A module for the English, Media and Intercultural course.
This module engages you in empirical studies of real-world speech communities. You will describe regional and social dialects of English in Britain, and work in emerging approaches to dialectology in English as a lingua franca and “new” Englishes. You will gather language data through a variety of methodologies, including collecting written surveys, conducting face-to-face interviews, and datamining social media. You will deepen your knowledge about types of language change, motivations for it, and models to describe it. You will be challenged to create high-quality research outputs that advance knowledge, and hone qualitative and quantitative analytic skills that will be essential to your dissertation and other linguistic work.