"Postdoctoral Research Associate in Sociolinguistics (News UK)"

About the role

This fixed term, non-renewable, one-year postdoctoral position will support continuing analysis of data from the new London English Corpus, which has been developed as part of the ESRC project Generations of London English: Dialect and Social Change in Real Time.

Project website: https://generationsoflondonenglish.org/

Led by Principal Investigator Professor Devyani Sharma, the project and the corpus represent the largest cross-sectional study of London English, looking at how people speak and how they hear each other, across varieties, ages, and social classes. In particular, it enables real-time study of the first two generations of major new dialects in London, that emerged in the context of dramatic changes in migration and demographics 40 years ago. The project offers researchers, teachers, journalists, writers, students, and the wider public insights into how language changes and into the social dynamics of contemporary Western cities. The London English Corpus is comprised of samples of speech from a range of neighbourhoods of London, age groups, social class backgrounds, and ethnicities.

The advertised role will combine scholarly research in sociolinguistics with opportunities for professional development, working with partner organisations such as the British Library and in the wider sociolinguistics community in Oxford and London. Analysis will potentially include tracking dialect and accent change in large-scale real-time data from multiple generations in London, testing predictions of language contact and sociolinguistic theory, analysing the repertoires and play interactions of young children in a complex social environment, examining repertoires of adolescents and older speakers, examining the role of cognitive factors such as acquisition and control in these dynamics, and testing the role of accent in the processing of non-linguistic information by a range of listeners.

About you

You will hold a PhD in Linguistics or a related field and have a track record of outstanding research, particularly in the area of variationist sociolinguistics, sociophonetics, and other methodologies in sociolinguistics. You will have advanced skills working with sociolinguistic data and with relevant software, in particular Praat and R. You will have experience devising quantitative methods for analysis of complex data sets and experience with multivariate statistics. You will have experience writing up research results for different audiences, and will be able to manage an academic workload independently. You will have good communications skills and an aptitude for collaboration as well as interdisciplinary and public engagement work.

The duties and skills required are described in further detail in the job description.

For your online application, you will be required to upload your curriculum vitae and a supporting statement, setting out how you meet the selection criteria for the post, using examples of your skills and experience. As part of your application, you will be asked to provide details of two referees and indicate whether we can contact them now.

For further details, please refer to the how to apply section of the job description. Any further enquires may be directed to Theresa Phillips at recruitment@ell.ox.ac.uk

The closing date for applications is 12.00 noon (BST) on 4 February 2025. Only applications received before this time can be considered.

Shortlisting will take place on or near to 10 February 2026 and interviews will be held on 18 February 2026.

Please quote Vacancy ID 184373 on all correspondence.

Committed to equality and valuing diversity