Guest Lectures

Date & Place

When: 14 October 2026, 9:15-10:30

Where: Main Building, room 304

Zoom:  https://unibe-ch.zoom.us/j/69982677529

Abstract

Multiethnolects, that is registers or speech styles that emerge in environments where many different languages are spoken in the homes of ethnically minoritized people who are also acquiring the majority language where they live, have been documented in a number of (Western) European cities. Quist (2000) is the first study to describe the Copenhagen multiethnolect as a result of her ethnographic field work at an inner city school. That study focused on variation in grammar and lexis but noted that the multiethnolect had a characteristic kind of prosody which sounded “more staccato”.

This talk will present sociophonetic work based on Quist’s (2000) observation to show how we may use the tools of instrumental and experimental phonetics to study phenomena of sociolinguistic importance.  I will present how we designed the map task that forms the basis of the studies presented in Hansen & Pharao (2010), which focused on rhythmic aspects of the prosody of the Copenhagen multiethnolect, focusing on why and how the map task was selected and constructed. The results of this study revealed that variability in rhythmic related phonetic parameters in the multiethnolect interact with the phonological system of the majority language that it is a variety of.

The other part of the talk revisits the corpus collected for and described in Hansen & Pharao (2010) to study differences in the alignment of pitch peaks and stress in the varieties of Copenhagen with a focus on the multiethnolect. Danish is a language where pitch cues stress, but unlike in other related languages, the shape of the tonal contour is not used for phonological contrast but instead serves as a cue for regional variety (Pharao & Tøndering 2020). I will discuss how differences in rhythm and tone combine to create a distinct prosody for the Copenhagen multiethnolect.

Date & Place

When: 14 October 2026, 14:00-15:15

Where: Main Building, room 304

Zoom: https://unibe-ch.zoom.us/j/63421995618

Abstract

Liquid consonants are phonetically complex events that pattern in phonologically distinctive ways (Sproat & Fujimura 1993). They vary systematically across languages (Gick et al. 2016; Nagamine 2026) and exhibit considerable sociophonetic variation across dialects (Turton 2017; Lawson et al. 2018; Kirkham et al. 2020), bilingual communities (Kirkham & McCarthy 2021; Kirkham & Zara 2024), and speakers within a community (Kirkham 2017). What is it about liquids that makes them so variable? It is widely thought that liquids are produced through multiple, independently controlled constrictions, whose relative magnitude and timing can be reweighted without impairing phonological contrast. My proposal is that these articulatory degrees of freedom create significant opportunity for social, dialectal and diachronic forces to exert pressure on the liquid system.

I develop the above argument in three strands, drawing on work conducted by me and my research group over the last decade. The first strand examines language contact, where interacting phonetic systems produce selective reweighting of individual gestures (Kirkham 2017; Kirkham & McCarthy 2021; Kirkham & Zara 2024; Nagamine 2026). The second strand shows how the separability of these gestures leads to diachronic asymmetries, making some aspects of liquid systems far more susceptible to sound change than others (Kirkham & Nance 2022; Nance & Kirkham 2022; Nance et al. 2026). The third strand turns to timing, demonstrating how sociophonetic variation in liquids interacts with higher-level prosodic structure, such as syllable organisation (Gorman 2024). This research shows that gestural coordination is a major locus of variation and that further sociophonetic investigation of such phenomena could lead to major theoretical advances in our understanding of spoken language.

When & Where

When: 15 October 2026, 9:00-10:15

Where: Main Building, room 304

Zoom: https://unibe-ch.zoom.us/j/61375946771

Abstract

During language change, children increment away from parental norms and toward innovative community patterns, eventually emerging as leaders of change (Labov, 2007). While this process is well established through apparent-time and real-time evidence (Labov, 2001; Tagliamonte & D’Arcy, 2009; Holmes-Elliott, 2016, 2020; Smith & Holmes-Elliott, 2022), less is known about how children determine the direction and magnitude of their adjustment.

Recent accounts propose that incrementation is driven by momentum-based learning, whereby children extract age-graded trajectories from the speech community and use them to position themselves at the leading edge of change (Bermúdez-Otero, 2020). This predicts that community-level patterns should affect how easily change is learned: highly variable changes may provide weaker learning signals than those with more consistent trajectories. Evidence from TH-fronting and T-glottaling supports this view (Holmes-Elliott, 2020), but both variables are categorical and socially stigmatized, making it difficult to separate the mechanics of incrementation from social evaluation.

To test predictions about the direction, magnitude, and convergence of incrementation requires fine-grained phonetic analysis of continuous vowel measures rather than categorical variables. As such, the present study examines two non-stigmatized vowel changes, GOOSE-fronting (8,000 tokens) and TRAP-backing (6,500 tokens). Across real time, GOOSE-fronting shows higher rates of predicted incrementation than TRAP-backing (12/13 vs. 10/13 speakers), yet both changes exhibit convergence in Hertz values. These findings suggest that both the strength of apparent-time trajectories and the degree of community variability shape the learning vectors that children extract and internalize during language change. More broadly, these findings demonstrate how fine-grained phonetic analysis can advance our understanding of core sociolinguistic processes, including momentum-based learning as a driver of language change.