Jennifer Smith (sociolinguist)

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Professor
Jennifer Smith
FRSE
EducationMA in Linguistics University of Durham PhD in 2000 from the University of York
OccupationProfessor of sociolinguistics
Employer The University of Glasgow School of Critical Studies
Known forsociolinguistic studies in Scottish dialects and colonial English
Notable workScottish Syntax Atlas [1]

Jennifer Smith is a sociolinguistic specialist in language variation and dialects, especially Scottish dialects across the generations and geography of Scotland, including developing the Scottish syntax atlas [1] which analyses the diversity. Her research also covers variations in colonial English, for example, in North America. [2] Professor of sociolinguistics at the University of Glasgow School of Critical Studies, she teaches and researches language and variation theory. [3]

Contents

Biography

Originally from Buckie, and speaking in that dialect, [4] Smith taught English in Athens [5] before studying for her MA in Linguistics at Durham University. [3] Her doctorate was completed at the University of York (2000) on Synchrony and Diachrony of English: Evidence from Scotland. [6] She was a lecturer at York [7] before becoming professor of linguistics at the University of Glasgow, School of Critical Studies. In 2009 she took time off for health reasons, recovering from ovarian cancer and married her long term partner. [8]

In addition to her own teaching and research interests, Smith is the research convenor of English Language and Linguistics at Glasgow, and is an external examiner for the University of Sheffield, Queen Mary, University of London, Lancaster University and the Open University. She is a PhD examiner for Newcastle University, Trinity College Dublin (2014) and the Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense. She is also a member of the ESRC Virtual College and Assessor for the Natural Science Foundation and Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. [3]

Publications and editorships

Smith is on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Linguistics and is a reviewer for articles for that journal and for Language Variation & Change, Journal of Sociolinguistics , Journal of Child Language. She also is a monograph reviewer for academic publishers Mouton, CUP and OUP . [3] Smith was co-editor in 2017 of Studies in Middle and Modern English: Historical Variation. Series: Studies in the history of the English language, [9] and also previously (in 2014) of Studies in Middle and Modern English: Historical Change. Series: Studies in the history of the English language. [10]

Research with Sali Tagliamonte of the University of Toronto covered variations in sociolinguistic specifics as well as North American variants. [11] Her work with Sophie Holmes-Elliott of Queen Mary University of London was on certain sounds, and findings were presented at the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. [12]

Smith's (currently 38) key research articles are listed by the Glasgow University School of Critical Studies, [13] and includes work on caregiver and child communications, and other early years dialect learning, presented in articles and at international conferences . [14] [2]

She recently (2019) worked with Mercedes Durham of Cardiff University on a book on sociolinguistic variation in children's language. [15] She had previously contributed a chapter to the Routledge Companion to Sociolinguistics on the analysis of morphosyntactic variation (2007), [16] and wrote the foreword to Sociolinguistics in Scotland (2014). [17]

Research communications

Smith has communicated in press and social media about her research, such as the computer modelling showing that local dialects are thriving [18] both in terms of words and sounds, and also sentence structures, [19] such that some Scots are considered bilingual. [20] She also spoke about the variation in perceived attractiveness of a voice [21] or the adoption of 'posh' voices for circumstances, including the modern need to instruct technology (voice activation) in a tendency to use slower and more formal speaking ('tech tongue'). [22]

Jennifer Smith was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2021. [23]

Related Research Articles

Sociolinguistics is the descriptive study of the effect of any or all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on language and the ways it is used. It can overlap with the sociology of language, which focuses on the effect of language on society. Sociolinguistics overlaps considerably with pragmatics and is closely related to linguistic anthropology.

African-American English is the set of English sociolects spoken by most Black people in the United States and many in Canada; most commonly, it refers to a dialect continuum ranging from African-American Vernacular English to a more standard American English. Like all widely spoken language varieties, African-American English shows variation stylistically, generationally, geographically, in rural versus urban characteristics, in vernacular versus standard registers, etc. There has been a significant body of African-American literature and oral tradition for centuries.

The Glasgow dialect, also called Glaswegian, varies from Scottish English at one end of a bipolar linguistic continuum to the local dialect of West Central Scots at the other. Therefore, the speech of many Glaswegians can draw on a "continuum between fully localised and fully standardised". Additionally, the Glasgow dialect has Highland English and Hiberno-English influences owing to the speech of Highlanders and Irish people who migrated in large numbers to the Glasgow area in the 19th and early 20th centuries. While being named for Glasgow, the accent is typical for natives across the full Greater Glasgow area and associated counties such as Lanarkshire, Renfrewshire, Dunbartonshire and parts of Ayrshire, which formerly came under the single authority of Strathclyde. It is most common in working class people, which can lead to stigma from members of other classes or those outside Glasgow.

African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) is the variety of English natively spoken, particularly in urban communities, by most working- and middle-class African Americans and some Black Canadians. Having its own unique grammatical, vocabulary and accent features, AAVE is employed by middle-class Black Americans as the more informal and casual end of a sociolinguistic continuum. However, in formal speaking contexts, speakers tend to switch to more standard English grammar and vocabulary, usually while retaining elements of the non-standard accent. AAVE is widespread throughout the United States, but is not the native dialect of all African Americans, nor are all of its speakers African American.

Peter Trudgill, is an English sociolinguist, academic and author.

J. K. "Jack" Chambers is a Canadian linguist, and a well-known expert on language variation and change, who has played an important role in research on Canadian English since the 1980s; he has coined the terms "Canadian Raising" and "Canadian Dainty", the latter used for Canadian speech that mimics the British, popular till the mid-20th century. He has been a professor of linguistics at the University of Toronto since receiving his a Ph.D. from the University of Alberta in 1970. He has also been a visiting professor at many universities worldwide, including Hong Kong University, University of Szeged, Hungary, University of Kiel in Germany, Canterbury University in New Zealand, the University of Reading and the University of York in the UK. He is the author of the website Dialect Topography, which compiles information about dialectal variation in the Golden Horseshoe region of Ontario, Canada.

Jenny L. Cheshire is a British sociolinguist and emeritus professor of linguistics at Queen Mary University of London. Her research interests include language variation and change, language contact and dialect convergence, and language in education, with a focus on conversational narratives and spoken English. She is most known for her work on grammatical variation, especially syntax and discourse structures, in adolescent speech and on Multicultural London English.

Nancy Currier Dorian was an American linguist who carried out research into the decline of the East Sutherland dialect of Scottish Gaelic for over 40 years, particularly in the villages of Brora, Golspie and Embo. Due to their isolation from other Gaelic-speaking communities, these East Sutherland villages presented a good opportunity to study language death. Dorian's study is possibly the longest such study in the field. She was considered "a prime authority" on language death. Language Death: The Life Cycle of a Scottish Gaelic Dialect, her study into the decline of Gaelic in East Sutherland, is considered "the first major monograph" on language death. According to linguist Joan Argenter, Dorian's name "is well known to scholars working in" several areas of linguistics.

Variation is a characteristic of language: there is more than one way of saying the same thing in a given language. Variation can exist in domains such as pronunciation, lexicon, grammar, and other features. Different communities or individuals speaking the same language may differ from each other in their choices of which of the available linguistic features to use, and how often, and the same speaker may make different choices on different occasions.

Allan Bell is a New Zealand academic and sociolinguistic researcher. He has written extensively on New Zealand English, language style, and media language. He is a founding co-editor of the international quarterly Journal of Sociolinguistics and is known for his theory of audience design. Currently, he is working as the Director of the Institute of Culture, Discourse & Communication and is a Professor of Language & Communication at Auckland University of Technology.

African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) is a nonstandard dialect of English deeply embedded in the culture of the United States, including popular culture. It has been the center of controversy about the education of African-American youths, the role AAVE should play in public schools and education, and its place in broader society. The linguistic and cultural history of African Americans has been fostered and maintained in part through the Black church, including some lexicon and the call and response style of linguistic engagement. Artistic and cultural movements originating with African Americans, such as jazz and hip-hop, have also significantly showcased, influenced, or sometimes mainstreamed elements of AAVE in the broader American culture and even on the global stage. The dialect is also seen and heard in advertising.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Shana Poplack</span> American linguist living in Canada, variation theory specialist

Shana Poplack, is a Distinguished University Professor in the linguistics department of the University of Ottawa and three time holder of the Canada Research Chair in Linguistics. She is a leading proponent of variation theory, the approach to language science pioneered by William Labov. She has extended the methodology and theory of this field into bilingual speech patterns, the prescription-praxis dialectic in the co-evolution of standard and non-standard languages, and the comparative reconstruction of ancestral speech varieties, including African American vernacular English. She founded and directs the University of Ottawa Sociolinguistics Laboratory.

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Penelope "Penny" Eckert is Albert Ray Lang Professor Emerita of Linguistics at Stanford University. She specializes in variationist sociolinguistics and is the author of several scholarly works on language and gender. She served as the president of the Linguistic Society of America in 2018.

Gillian Elizabeth Sankoff is a Canadian-American sociolinguist, and professor emerita of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. Sankoff's notable former students include Miriam Meyerhoff.

Miriam Meyerhoff, is a New Zealand sociolinguist and academic. In 2020, she was appointed a senior research fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. In 2024 she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy.

Sali A. Tagliamonte is a Canadian linguist. Her main area of research is the field of language variation and change.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Christian Kay</span>

Christian Janet Kay was Emeritus Professor of English Language and Honorary Professorial Research Fellow in English Language and Linguistics at the University of Glasgow. She was an editor, with her mentor Michael Samuels, of the world's largest and first historical thesaurus, the Historical Thesaurus of English, first published in 2009 as the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (HTOED), a project to which she dedicated 40 years.

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References

  1. 1 2 Smith, Jennifer; Adger, David; Aitken, Brian; Heycock, Caroline; Jamieson, E.; Gary, Thoms (17 December 2019). "The Scots Syntax Atlas". scotssyntaxatlas.ac.uk. Retrieved 9 August 2021.
  2. 1 2 "Plenary speakers". 7th Biennial International Conference on the Linguistics of Contemporary English. 28 August 2015. Retrieved 9 August 2021.
  3. 1 2 3 4 "University of Glasgow - Schools - School of Critical Studies - Our staff - Prof Jennifer Smith". www.gla.ac.uk. Retrieved 9 August 2021.
  4. ↑ Graddol, David; Leith, Dick; Swann, Joan; Rhys, Martin; Gillen, Julia (24 July 2020). Changing English. Routledge. pp. section 6.7. ISBN   978-1-000-15531-0.
  5. ↑ Seargeant, Philip; Swann, Joan (1 March 2013). English in the World: History, Diversity, Change. Routledge. pp. Biographical information. ISBN   978-1-136-44567-5.
  6. ↑ York Papers in Linguistics. University of York, Department of Language. 2006.
  7. ↑ Clinical sociolinguistics. Martin J. Ball. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub. 2005. pp. XIII. ISBN   1-4051-4138-7. OCLC   60570262.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link)
  8. ↑ Spowart, Nan (29 March 2009). "Brave bride Jennifer's battle against 'silent killer' of ovarian cancer". Daily Record. Retrieved 9 August 2021.
  9. ↑ Studies in Middle and Modern English : Historical Variation. Akinobu Tani, Jennifer Smith, 谷明信., ジェニファー, 英語. スミス. Tōkyō: Kaitakusha. 2017. ISBN   978-4-7589-2249-4. OCLC   992703371.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link)
  10. ↑ Studies in middle and modern English : historical change. Yoko Iyeiri, Jennifer Smith, Eigoshi Kenkyūkai. Suita-shi, Osaka, Japan. 2014. ISBN   978-4-9904584-4-7. OCLC   1062268157.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) CS1 maint: others (link)
  11. ↑ Tagliamonte, Sali A.; Smith, Jennifer (1 January 2002). ""Either it isn't or it's not": neg/aux contraction in British dialects". English World-Wide. 23 (2): 251–281. doi:10.1075/eww.23.2.05tag. ISSN   0172-8865.
  12. ↑ Holmes-Elliott, Sophie; Smith, Jennifee (August 2015). "DRESS-down: /ε/-lowering in apparent time in a rural Scottish community". eprints.gla.ac.uk. Retrieved 9 August 2021.
  13. ↑ "University of Glasgow - Schools - School of Critical Studies - Our staff - Prof Jennifer Smith". www.gla.ac.uk. Retrieved 9 August 2021.
  14. ↑ Smith, Jennifer; Durham, Mercedes; Fortune, Liane (22 January 2007). ""Mam, my trousers is fa'in doon!": Community, caregiver, and child in the acquisition of variation in a Scottish dialect". Language Variation and Change. 19 (1). doi:10.1017/s0954394507070044. ISSN   0954-3945. S2CID   26441220.
  15. ↑ Smith, Jennifer; Durham, Mercedes (2019). Sociolinguistic Variation in Children's Language: Acquiring Community Norms. Studies in Language Variation and Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN   978-1-107-17261-6.
  16. ↑ Llamas, Carmen; Mullany, Louise; Stockwell, Peter (2007). The Routledge Companion to Sociolinguistics. Routledge. ISBN   978-0-415-33849-3.
  17. ↑ Lawson, R. (22 January 2014). Sociolinguistics in Scotland. Springer. ISBN   978-1-137-03471-7.
  18. ↑ Wade, Mike. "Lose our accents? Gonnae no' dae that!". The Times . ISSN   0140-0460 . Retrieved 9 August 2021.
  19. ↑ Fairnie, Robert (30 December 2019). "Interactive map reveals what 'Scots' phrases Edinburgh folk do and don't say". edinburghlive. Retrieved 9 August 2021.
  20. ↑ Williams, Craig (28 February 2021). "The reason why Glaswegians can actually be considered 'bilingual'". GlasgowLive. Retrieved 9 August 2021.
  21. ↑ "BBC Scotland - Rebel Tongue". BBC. Retrieved 9 August 2021.
  22. ↑ Beresford, Jack. "Irish accent voted 'most attractive' in new poll". The Irish Post. Retrieved 9 August 2021.
  23. ↑ "Professor Jennifer Smith FRSE". The Royal Society of Edinburgh. 6 May 2021. Retrieved 9 August 2021.
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