Josh Clothier

Hi there - I'm a Senior Tutor in Linguistics and Applied Linguistics at the University of Melbourne.  In semester 1, 2025, I will be tutoring on The Secret Life of Language, Intercultural Communication, and Phonetics.  This work is done through the University of Melbourne where I sit in the Phonetics Laboratory within the School of Languages and Linguistics in the Faculty of Arts.  I am also completing my PhD within the School, and was an affiliate researcher with the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language.  

My research interests are focussed on the nexus between the fine phonetic detail of speech and social identities and social meanings. My particular interest is in this focusses on speakers with global majority ethnic identities in (mainly) Anglo-dominant countries like Australia. My PhD research examines how Lebanese Australians index their variable ethnic identities at the segmental and sub-segmental levels (contributing to what might be heard as distinctive accents in some speakers by some listeners). This work has also raised questions about the social indexical status of a number of vocalic and consonantal variables in "mainstream" Australian English, and the ways in which women and men navigate ethnic and linguistic spaces in different ways. More broadly I am interested in sociophonetics, third wave sociolinguistics, and how we can use acoustic phonetic data to inform these with empirical rigour. Conversely, I'm interested in the rich perspectives a truly sociophonetic approach can provide to the analysis of acoustic phonetic data.    

Through my research work, I have been involved in a number of (primarily) sociophonetic projects, including a long term collaboration with Dr Debbie Loakes, which looks at a vowel merger in progress and, recently, is examining this phenomenon in speakers of Aboriginal Englishes in Victoria.  I also work with Dr Chloé Diskin on her projects which look at second dialect acquisition of phonetic variables, and Dr Olga Maxwell in her work on Indian English perception and production. I also have long-term collaborations with the Language Testing Research Centre at the University of Melbourne, most recently having worked with Dr Kellie Frost and Professor Gillian Wigglesworth on a project examining the different strategies test-takers use when completing the TOEFL iBT read-and-listen to speak speaking test, reflecting my ongoing interest in language testing and applied linguistics.  

You can find my publications on Google scholar—please get in touch with me if you would like an author's copy of any paper.  I do not respond to impersonal "requests" submitted via ResearchGate or Academia.edu.

My most recent publication, a collaboration with Dr Debbie Loakes, is an entry on Ethnolects in Australian English which has been accepted for publication in the forthcoming Wiley Blackwell Encyclopaedia of World Englishes, edited (in chief, but among others) by Kingsley Bolton.