Research

My ongoing research project is Stimmen fan Fryslân, a citizen science project with the goal of crowd sourcing minority speech data for linguistic research and speech technology development. The project employs an app built to collect data for linguistic research through fun activities. The citizen scientist can record their own language, or the language of others, with the app. In some cases the app can even guess where people are from. The app consists of a picture naming game, a free speech recorder and a dialect quiz.

I currently supervise three PhD students: Vincent Boswijk, Liefke Reitsma and Marcela H Herrera. Previous PhD students include Amber Nota who I worked with on the project 'Multilingual Melodies' that looked into prosodic variation in multilingual speakers. Amber Nota worked on a prosodic description of Frisian-Dutch speech within the project. More information about activities in Multilingual Melodies can be found here.

I have previously held a post doc on a project about mutual intelligibility between closely related languages at the University of Groningen. You can read more about my post-doc project, led by Dr. Charlotte Gooskens, here.

My main research interests outside my personal projects include experimental research to the interface between cognition and social variation in language. I am also interested in the relationship between regional identity and linguistic variation, and the sociophonetics of Norwegian and Frisian.

I wrote my PhD thesis about regional dialect levelling in Norway, at the Department of Language and Linguistic Science at the University of York. My thesis was concerned with linguistic variation in East Norwegian and its relationship to the ideology of a standard language. I was particularly interested in the relationship of a capital city as opposed to a written language on dialect change, and conducted a study of variation in word stress patterns, phonology and morpho-syntax in combination with a survey of language attitudes and regional identity in the Norwegian city Hønefoss. The thesis is available here

Please see below for my full academic CV