I'm Professor and Personal Chair of Sociolinguistics, in Linguistics and English Language, in the School of Philosophy, Psychology, and Language Sciences, at the University of Edinburgh. As a sociophonetician, I study the social aspects of phonetic variation. My research focuses on differences in speech among speakers of different social backgrounds and in different social contexts. I'm interested in the factors that affect how speech changes over time. I'm also interested in variation as a social signal and the impact of accent on speakers' credibility and economic success. Since the Covid-19 pandemic hit, I have been the founder and director of the Lothian Diary Project. |
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"Without something to belong to, we have no stable self, and yet total commitment and attachment to any social unity implies a kind of selflessness. Our sense of being a person can come from being drawn into a wider social unit; our sense of selfhood can arise through the little ways in which we resist the pull. Our status is backed by the solid building of the world, while our sense of personal identity often resides in the cracks." -- Erving Goffman 1961, Asylums, p.250
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