Language variation and change

Contact between languages is an important factor that introduces variability into a language, which may lead to language change.

We are interested in the effects of the presence of two or more languages in individual psycholinguistic processing as much as in the social context more broadly. This is the focus of research into areas as diverse as:

• creole languages
• English as a lingua franca (ELF)
• learner Englishes (also studied under the rubric of English as a foreign language or EFL)
• non-native indigenised varieties of English (L2 varieties or New Englishes)
• second-language acquisition (SLA).

We investigate how language contact may lead to cross-linguistic influence – at lexical, semantic, phonetic, phonological, prosodic, tonemic, graphemic, morphological, syntactic and pragmatic levels – in both spoken and written language, and how this may lead to language change over time.

Sociophonetics integrates the principles, theoretical frameworks, and techniques of phonetics with those of sociolinguistics to advance our understanding of language variation, including the origins and spread of sound change.

Sociophonetic analysis uses sophisticated phonetic and statistical approaches to investigate features of speech production, perception, and language processing in relation to socially determined factors within individuals and groups.

Factors such as age, sex, gender orientation, language background, regional affiliation and history, ethnicity, speaking style, community of practice, and the demands of social context (among many others) all affect the way we process speech.

In quantifying the fine phonetic detail of speech production and perception, we use methods from:

• acoustic phonetics
• speech physiology (eg electroarticulography, ultrasound and electroglottography)
• psycholinguistics (eg eye tracking, priming and shadowing).

The analysis of variation includes both synchronic and diachronic approaches to establish phonetic variation in the community at a point in time (synchronic) and across different time periods (diachronic).

Sociolinguistics investigates the interaction between language, culture and society. We analyse how this interaction affects the variability of language in a systematic way, focusing on how:

• linguistic variation results from different speaker backgrounds and different contexts of communication
• the use of linguistic variants construct social meaning in interaction.

In this research, we draw extensively on the methods of quantitative variationist sociolinguistics.

World Englishes offer a very dynamic field for linguistic and sociolinguistic research, with new varieties continually evolving in multilingual habitats across the world.

Macquarie researchers focus on English in contact with other languages in postcolonial contexts, such as South Africa and the Philippines.

This project is an ongoing study into the phonetics and phonology of Australian English, including aspects of its origin, evolution and variation.

Explore the Australian Voices website, an interactive and accessible resource which invites users to explore accent variation and change. An extensive collection of audio files will take you on a linguistic journey spanning 100 years.

You can listen to audio files of spoken language from speakers from a range of different cultural, social and regional groups including:

• Australian Aboriginal English
• mainstream Australian English
• various ethnocultural Australian English varieties.

This project uses newly compiled comparable historical corpora of the British, Australian and South African Hansard to investigate how written English usage changes over time in three varieties of English.

This project is funded under a Macquarie University Research Development Grant (MQRDG 2017-2018).

This project investigates how regional varieties develop their local features while in contact with neighbouring varieties and 'supervarieties' (such as American and British English) through global media, in print, broadcast and online.

This project addresses two questions on relationships among varieties of world English:

1. whether particular varieties of English function as epicentres of influence on neighbouring varieties (for example Indian English on Pakistani or Sri Lankan English; or Australian English on New Zealand's)
2. how great the influence of American English is on these four ex-British Commonwealth Englishes

This project is funded by a Universities Australia/DAAD grant (2018-2019) in partnership with the Justus Liebig University Giessen.

Varieties of English in the Indo-Pacific: English in Contact (VEIP-EIC) is an international research initiative, embracing the now numerous varieties of English in the Indo-Pacific, and focusing on their contact with other languages in areas adjacent to the Indian and Pacific Oceans.

VEIP currently includes projects on:

• ASEAN English
• Australian English
• Fiji English
• Filipino English
• Hong Kong/China English
• Indian/Sri Lankan English
• Melanesian English
• Micronesian English
• Singapore English
• South African English
• Ugandan English.