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Fieldwork tools used in the Intonational Variation in Arabic project, and a sample of the results, on display as part of the 10th anniversary celebrations of the University of York Humanities Research Centre.

Presenting the initial results of a joint study (with Carmen Llamas) of intonational variation and change in York, in association with York 50+ Festival (with thanks to York Older People’s Assembly).

Thanks to BBC Radio York for inviting me to talk about swearing with Julia Lewis (without swearing once!). We discussed issues relevant to English Language A level from corpus and attitudes research including:

• Rob Drummond’s work on teenage swearing in the UK
• an article about the first written occurrence of ‘the f-word’
• Tonje Gjesdal’s Norwegian Studies Centre open access thesis on attitudes to swearing. Warning!: contains very strong language.

Email me if you would like a copy of the recording; it includes a vox pop about attitudes to swearing which would be a great lesson starter.

Celebrating for Dr Sehrish Shafi, who sadly could not join us in person, for her thesis “A Phonological Analysis of English Loanwords in Mirpur Pahari: Exploring Variable Adaptation in Optimality Theory“.

Delighted to celebrate the graduation of Dr Shadiya AlHashmi!

Shadiya’s PhD is in historical phonology, reconstructing the trajectory of phonetic adaptation of Arabic loanwords into Turkish.

I’ve endorsed the Austin Principles of Data Citation in Linguistics.

The Intonational Variation in Arabic corpus is published by the UK Data Service and will be available open access  from September 29th 2018.

Poster presented at the 9th Speech Prosody conference in Poznań June 13-16th 2018; the paper is available open access at: www.isca-speech.org/archive/SpeechProsody_2018/pdfs/240.pdf

New work on systematic inter-generational variation in the intonation patterns of speakers from Middlesbrough, in collaboration with Carmen Llamas, presented at the 8th Northern Englishes Workshop.

Proud to see two of my most recent research students graduate this last weekend:

• Cath Pease: MA by Research for work on accentedness and intelligibility in the speech of L1 Arabic learners of L2 English
• Saudi Sadiq: PhD for work on dialect (non-)levelling in Egypt (co-supervised with Paul Kerswill)

Great day out to Newcastle with Ann Taylor and Rebecca Woods to present a taster of our York CPD work with teachers of English Language A level at the inaugural English: Shared Futures conference.