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Description
Module Content
What does your accent say about you? Does your age or gender have an effect on how you speak? What about geography or social class? This course aims to develop students' awareness of the complex relationship between spoken language and society through discussion of existing literature and through experience of handling data collected from studies of language variation. The focus will be on phonetic and phonological variation and change and so it is assumed that students will be familiar with basic concepts in phonetics and phonology. Understanding patterns of spoken language variation requires a multidisciplinary approach, and so during the course students will be introduced to aspects of historical linguistics, language acquisition, speech perception and production.
Teaching Delivery
Teaching is in the form of 1 x 1 hr lectures and 1 x 1 hr lab sessions per week, including experimental work and discussion of journal articles
Indicative Topics
Indicative lecture topics are based on module content in 2023/24, subject to possible changes.
The module focuses on approaches to studying phonetic and phonological variation. Topics covered include;
Regional and Social Dialectology; Accommodation & Audience Design; Language Attitudes; Real and apparent time; Second dialect acquisition; multilingualism.
Module Aims and/or Objectives
鈥� To introduce the study of phonetic and phonological variation and change through theory and data.
鈥� To develop understanding of state-of-the-art theory and methods for studying phonetic variation change
鈥� To develop understanding of what the study of variation can contribute towards our linguistic theory and to our understanding of how speakers and listeners use talk in their everyday lives.
Module deliveries for 2024/25 academic year
Last updated
This module description was last updated on 8th April 2024.
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