Research Projects

Funded by DFG (2023-2026)

This project explores the phonology of Nigerian English, its regional and social variation as well as its possible shared commonalities with Ghanaian and Cameroonian English using a corpus-based approach. To this end, ICE-Nigeria will be enriched with phonemic annotations that were created with the FAVE-aligner and manually corrected.

The two major theoretical objectives of the project are to make a contribution to theories and models of the development of postcolonial Englishes and to test the question of whether a pan-West African variety of English exists. The project will thus contribute to the question of the ‘developmental stage’ of Nigerian English, and to the investigation of the relationship between regional and (trans-)national norms of English in West Africa.

Methodologically, the project wil provide a best-practice scenario for other corpus compilers who wish to turn other ICE corpora (or any other spoken data) into a phonologically annotated corpus. Specifically, it will show the benefit of using state-of-the-art tools for phonological corpus compilation, such as automatic speech recognition for orthographic transcriptions and forced alignment for semi-automatic segmentation and phonemic annotation.

Moreover, at the data analysis level, the project aims to show the usefulness of (semi-)automated methods, in particular Bayesian vowel formant estimation, in extracting both large-scale and reliable acoustic information, which, in turn, can be used to investigate time-varying acoustic parameters even for nominal monophthongs, i.e. vowel inherent spectral change.

Project members:

• Principal Investigator: Prof. Dr. Ulrike Gut

• Postdoc: Dr. Philipp Meer

• Research assistants: Charlotte Möllers, Kilian Yilmaz, Sophia Fischer, Polina Kashkarova, Sophie Katharina Richter, Decai Xia

Project website at University of Münster: https://www.uni-muenster.de/Anglistik/Research/EngLing/research/NigerianEnglish.html

Grant Agreement n° 2022-1-IT02-KA220-SCH-000087602 OID E10209118

Duration: until 30/12/2025

Accents: foreign, regional, local. We don’t talk about them much but they’re an integral part of our lives. And they’re always with us: we are constantly carrying them around, whether as a millstone or a trophy. “I like your accent”, “your accent irritates me”, “your accent is so cool”.   Accents are a linguistic phenomenon (they regard the way we speak, the sounds, the intonation…) but also a social one: if my interlocutor identifies me as a foreigner, as a migrant, as “different”, this identification has an impact, for better or worse, on my everyday life.  Our accents are also a badge of identity: they convey my personal story, because I am the language that I speak and how I speak it.

Accents have a substantial impact in the workplace (for example, in job interviews), in legal contexts (believing a witness with a foreign accent is apparently harder than believing a witness without one) and in school settings. Accent discrimination in this third setting – schools - is precisely the focus of the ERASMUS+ project “Counteracting accent dIscrimination pRactiCes in Education” (CIRCE). The project, which has just got underway, will last for 36 months and will be led by the University of Siena (Italy) in collaboration with the Italian National Research Council (CNR), the University of Münster (UM, Germany), Universität Hamburg (UH, Germany), International Burch University (IBU, Bosnia and Herzegovina), and the University of Évora (Portugal).

The CIRCE project addresses accent discrimination in education. The project acronym (CIRCE) alludes to the goddess of the human voice, who precisely because of this characteristic was viewed suspiciously by the gods: one of the earliest examples of ‘accentism’. The school environment is a hotspot for investigating this issue: students are exposed to different accents and form and reinforce their attitudes and beliefs towards them also on the basis of peer pressure.  Teachers are also confronted daily with regional and non-native accents of the national language, and may unconsciously succumb to prejudice and negative evaluations of non-standard varieties. The scientific literature shows that this can occur even in people with high sensitivity to linguistic diversity and multilingualism. Accentism is serious, because it can result in disparaging and hypercritical attitudes toward students who are already at risk of dropping out of school.

CIRCE aims to raise awareness about accent discrimination in the school and university environment, and to develop in students and teachers a greater tolerance towards accent variation. Accentism is in fact a phenomenon that is still little known, and the general lack of awareness that surrounds it makes it hard to pin down its effects. But it is actually a powerful discriminatory mechanism, and it is essential to counter its mechanisms by promoting knowledge of how it works.

The approach being taken by CIRCE is

• a) transnational: by involving partners from different countries, CIRCE will offer a broad picture of the phenomenon, and make it possible to compare linguistic prejudices related to the languages of the  different countries in which the project partners are located; 

• b) integrated: the project addresses all the actors in the school environment: students, teachers, and families;

• c) sustainable: CIRCE will develop tools that can be reused by students and teachers, and, most importantly, teaches a method that makes it possible to ferret out the phenomenon, so that it can be discussed and dealt with;

• d) inclusive: CIRCE embraces the principles of citizen science by including its target stakeholders in the research process not as objects of scientific dissemination but as subjects contributing actively to the study of the phenomena under investigation. For this reason CIRCE aims to build together with students and teachers an investigation protocol to analyze the phenomenon of accent discrimination;

• e) data-savvy: in today’s knowledge society data is a valuable resource. CIRCE is aware of this and is committed to ensuring that the data collected are FAIRified and hosted in the CLARIN-IT archives.

The project will develop tools and resources to innovate school curricula and offer materials that enable teachers and educators to accommodate accent variation in their classrooms and other learning settings.

Project Coordinator:Prof. Silvia Calamai, University of Siena, Italy, silvia.calamai@unisi.it

Local coordinators at University of Münster: Dr. Philipp Meer & Prof. Dr. Frauke Matz

More information can be found on the main project website: https://www.circe-project.eu/

Status: Associated Researcher

While research on standard varieties of English has traditionally concentrated on the national level, in recent years, the focus has been increasingly also on transnational phenomena of English in today’s times of globalisation. However, those levels that are located in between the nation state and the global level are still rarely considered. Using the concept of translocality, the second phase of this project funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation - DE 2324/1-2; PI: Prof. Dr. Dagmar Deuber) is devoted to standards of English in the anglophone Caribbean on all of these spatial levels: It analyses language use in the context of educational institutions in three Eastern Caribbean states (Trinidad & Tobago, Grenada and Dominica) with regard to national and regional standardisation processes as well as global influences such as from American English. However, it also considers subregional (subregions inside the anglophone Caribbean) and subnational (town vs. country) aspects as well as the interaction of factors related to the different spatial levels. 

Sociophonetic variation

The central object of empirical investigation is sociophonetic variation. Data collected in the first phase of the project from Dominican, Grenadian, and Trinidadian students and teachers (reading passages, word lists and meta-linguistic interviews) are analysed with regard to vocalic, consonantal, and prosodic aspects using a combination of acoustic and auditory methods. The aim is to describe similarities and differences within and between the selected territories, while taking into account language-internal and sociolinguistic variation. Based on data from more than 200 speakers, the project thus performs the first context-specific cross-national phonetic analysis of Standard English in the Caribbean. For the acoustic vowel analyses, a tool for automatic forced alignment and vowel formant estimation specifically calibrated to Trinidadian English is used (TRINI-FAVE; Meer & Matute Flores, 2018). TRINI-FAVE is also adapted for further Caribbean varieties of English and allows for large-scale automated analyses of tens to hundreds of thousands of vowels and speakers’ entire vowel spaces. Both target-oriented as well as dynamic acoustic analyses of vowels are carried out, i.e. analyses focusing on both specific acoustic targets as well as time-varying acoustic information (such as spectral (rate) of change).

 Several consonantal features are investigated using a combination of acoustic and auditory methods: the retraction of /s(tr)/, /tr/-affrication, rhoticity, TH-stopping, /t,d/ coda cluster reduction, and nasals in the DOWN set. The retraction of /s(tr)/ focuses on a large-scale automated acoustic analysis of the first spectral moment of all sibilants produced by all speakers. /tr/-affrication is analysed auditorily in conjunction with an inspection of spectral moments and zero crossing rates. Rhoticity is examined perceptually and based on an analysis of the F2 and F3 formant track of the preceding vowel. All remaining features are investigated auditorily. Variation in prosody is investigated in cooperation with Prof. Dr. Robert Fuchs at the University of Hamburg. Several prosodic aspects (inter alia, pitch level, pitch range, and pitch dynamism) are measured acoustically and compared to other (non-Caribbean) dialects of English.

Perception

The analysis of sociophonetic features is complemented by an investigation of the perception of oral language usage. An internet-based study tests in how far accents can be correctly assigned to the respective countries and subregions of origin inside the Caribbean. It follows up on an earlier investigation into the recognition of the national provenance of newscasters based on their accents by participants from the Caribbean (Hänsel & Deuber, 2019). In that study, the perception of people from the same country as the newscaster could not be considered as the participants often recognized the newscasters’ voices. In contrast, the present study uses stimuli of teachers from different anglophone Caribbean countries as less publicly known representatives of standard speakers. The selection of stimuli is based on the best possible comparability in terms of content and voice quality as well as on the occurrence of phonetic variables that display variation within the anglophone Caribbean. The purpose of the study is to identify in how far different Caribbean stimuli are perceived as similar or dissimilar as well as as local or not local and – to the extent possible – to determine the phonetic features that are relevant in this connection.

For details, please visit: https://www.uni-muenster.de/Anglistik/Research/variationlinguistics/research/translocalityII.html

Special interest group for scholars working at the intersection of linguistics and applied linguistics/language education led by Dr. Katharina von Elbwart (University of Paderborn) and myself. The aim is to connect (with) academics working in these disciplines, bring together like-minded scholars and practitioners, provide a platform for academic exchange and networking, and make research (projects) visible. 

For more details, please see: https://kw.uni-paderborn.de/institut-fuer-anglistik-und-amerikanistik/dr-katharina-von-elbwart/netzwerk-2nd-claling/programn

This project aims to investigate the current status of Global Englishes in German English language classrooms, teacher education, and other educational settings. It focuses on a variety of different (secondary) schools types, which are predominantly located in the state of North-Rhine Westphalia (NRW), learning materials and curricula, as well as centers for teacher education (Zentren für schulpraktische Lehrerausbildung). Different approaches are combined to explore this topic from different perspectives: language attitude studies with students, (future) teachers, and teacher trainers, an analysis of official language policy and learning materials, and classroom observations.

For details, please visit: https://www.uni-muenster.de/Anglistik/Staff/Meer_World_Englishes_in_the_EFL_Classroom_in_Germany.htmlhttps://www.uni-muenster.de/Anglistik/Staff/Meer_World_Englishes_in_the_EFL_Classroom_in_Germany.html

English: This project approaches English in Brazil from various perspectives. On the one hand, it examines English production among L1 speakers of Brazilian Portuguese, focusing on second language pronunciation or L2 phonology, with a focus on the segmental and, in particular, the suprasegmental level. Initial collaborative work in this context has already been conducted (Silva Jr. et al. 2024). On the other hand, sociolinguistic methods, particularly surveys, will be used to investigate the status and roles, as well as the functions and perceptions associated with English in different contexts in Brazil. Corpus linguistic approaches are currently in the planning phase.

Brazilian Portuguese: Este projeto aborda o inglês no Brasil de perspectivas diferentes. Por um lado, com foco na pronúncia de segunda língua ou fonologia L2, o projeto examina a produção do inglês em falantes L1 do português brasileiro com foco no nível segmental e especialmente suprassegmental. O trabalho inicial neste contexto já foi feito (Silva Jr. et al. 2024). Por outro lado, métodos sociolinguísticos, particularmente pesquisas, serão utilizados para investigar o status, as funções e percepções associadas à língua inglesa em diferentes contextos no Brasil. Abordagens linguísticas de corpus atualmente estão em fase de planejamento.

The project investigates various ways in which the latest automated speech processing methods (e.g., automatic speech recognition, forced alignment) can be used in acoustic phonetic analyses of New Englishes, i.e., for varieties of English spoken in Africa, Asia, or the Caribbean, with which the algorithms are typically not trained—unlike British or American English, for example. Some work has already been completed in this project (see e.g. Meer 2020; Meer et al. 2021). However, due to ongoing developments in speech processing and artificial intelligence, the latest methods and their usability for data processing and research on New Englishes will continue to be investigated, e.g., Open AI Whisper or WhisperX and Large Language Models. 

For detailed information on this COST Action, please visit: https://lithme.eu/

My own involvement as a member primarily concerns two Working Groups (WG):

• WG6: Ideologies, beliefs, attitudes: https://lithme.eu/working-groups/wg6/

• WG8: Language variation, pragmatics, and interaction: https://lithme.eu/working-groups/wg8/

Until 07/2020

For details, please visit: https://www.uni-muenster.de/Anglistik/Research/EngLing/research/ice-sco.html