Department of English

Academic Staff

Prof. Dr. David Britain

Ordentlicher Professor
Modern English Linguistics

E-Mail
david.britain@unibe.ch
Office
B 265
Postal Address
Department of English
Unitobler
Länggassstr. 49
CH – 3012 Bern
Consultation Hour
By appointment

David Britain studied Linguistics, French and German at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England (1983-87), before beginning a UK ESRC-sponsored PhD in sociolinguistics at the University of Essex in Colchester, England for which he investigated the linguistic consequences of dialect contact in the reclaimed Fenland of East Anglia. In 1991 he began a two-year Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of Linguistics (now School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies) of Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. There he was part of a research team (along with Janet Holmes, Allan Bell and Mary Boyce) undertaking the first large-scale social dialect analysis of New Zealand English. He returned to the University of Essex as a Lecturer in 1993, but retained his links with the Southern Hemisphere, as a British Academy-sponsored Visiting Scholar at Victoria University in 1996 and again in 1998, this time sponsored by the British Council, and as a visiting Scholar at the University of Sydney in 2000. In 2002 he became Senior Lecturer at Essex. Since January 2010 he has held the Chair of Modern English Linguistics here at the University of Bern. Dave was Associate Editor of the Journal of Sociolinguistics from 2008 to 2017, co-author of Linguistic perspectives on a variable English morpheme: let’s talk about –s. (Palgrave, 2019) (with Laura Rupp) and Linguistics: an introduction (Cambridge University Press, second edition, 2009) (with Andrew Radford, Martin Atkinson, Harald Clahsen and Andrew Spencer), editor of Language in the British Isles (Cambridge University Press, 2007) and co-editor (with Jenny Cheshire) of Social Dialectology (Benjamins, 2003), and is on the editorial boards of Journal of Sociolinguistics, English Language and Linguistics, English World-Wide and the Journal of Linguistic Geography. He has co-edited a special issue of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language on dialect death in Europe with Reinhild Vandekerckhove and Willy Jongenburger, published in 2009. He has been an invited speaker in France, Spain, Belgium, Germany, Greece, Austria, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Australia, Malaysia and the US, as well as New Zealand, the UK and Switzerland.

You can find more information about Prof Britain's research on his personal website: http://davebritain.weebly.com.

Teaching

Doctoral Supervision

I currently supervise 6 PhD students:

Servane CRAVERO: A Sociophonetics of Irish English

Sarah GROSSENBACHER: Dialect at the fairground: mobility and language variation among a nomadic British community (SNF-funded)

Elisa MARENZI: Becoming Australian: Italian and Lebanese Englishes in Melbourne

Rosario SIVIANES: Urban-Rural variation in the hinterland of Sevilla, Spain

Phillip TIPTON: The psycholinguistics of sociophonological variation and change in St Helens English

Franziska WAHL: Variation and change in the future tense in Southern England

Recent Courses

Spring 2022

On the Waterfront: Literary and Linguistic Perspectives

Analysing Language

BA Colloquium

MA Colloquium

Autumn 2021

Foundations of Language and Society

BA Colloquium

MA Colloquium

Spring 2021

Analysing Language

Language Contact (with Dr des Christoph Neuenschwander)

Unlearning Racism: Literary and Linguistic Perspectives

BA Colloquium

MA Colloquium

Autumn 2020

Foundations of Language and Society

Doing Dialect Data Analysis (with Dr Hannah Hedegard)

Jugendsprache in Europa (CSLS)

BA Colloquium

MA Colloquium

Spring 2020

Analysing Language

Introduction to Sociolinguistics (CSLS)

BA Colloquium

MA Colloquium

Autumn 2019

Foundations of Language and Society

Researching Youth Language (CSLS)

BA Colloquium

MA Colloquium

Publications

In press

Grammatical variation in England. In Susan Fox (ed.), Language in the British Isles (fully revised 3rd edition). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

[with Andrin Büchler and Lars Bülow] Does the linguistic market explain sociolinguistic variation in spoken Swiss Standard German. Language Variation and Change.

[with Laura Rupp]  Constraints on -s/zero verbal marking: new insighty from Norwich. Language Variation and Change.

[with Kazuko Matsumoto] The History of English in Micronesia. In Kingsley Bolton and Daniel Davis (eds.), Encyclopaedia of World Englishes. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell.

[with Kazuko Matsumoto] English in Micronesia. In Raymond Hickey (ed.), Cambridge History of the English Language: Volume 6: English in Africa, Asia, Australasia and the Pacific. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

[with Hannah Hedegard and Andrea Sudbury] English in the Falkland Islands. In Raymond Hickey (ed.), Cambridge History of the English Language: Volume 5: Cambirdge: Cambridge University Press.

[with Kazuko Matsumoto] English in Micronesia. In Kingsley Bolton and Daniel Davis (eds.), Encyclopaedia of World Englishes. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell.

[with Robert Potter]. English in East Anglia. In Raymond Hickey (ed.), Cambridge History of the English Language: Volume 4: Varieties of English in Britain, Ireland and Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

[with Hannah Hedegard and Andrea Sudbury] English in the Falkland Islands. In Kingsley Bolton and Daniel Davis (eds.), Encyclopaedia of World Englishes. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell.

[with Kazuko Matsumoto and Praparat Prompapakorn] Rural koineisation: three cases studies from Palau, Thailand and England. In Chr. Tzitzilis & G. Papanastassiou (eds.) Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Koine, koines and the formation of Standard Modern Greek. Thessaloniki: Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.

Regional dialects in England. In Kingsley Bolton and Daniel Davis (eds.), Encyclopaedia of World Englishes. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell.

[with Tamsin Blaxter and Adrian Leemann] English Dialects App. In Christopher Montgomery and Emma Moore (eds.), Oxford Handbook of British Englishes. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

[with Tamsin Blaxter and Adrian Leemann] English Dialects App. In Christopher Montgomery and Emma Moore (eds.), Oxford Handbook of British Englishes. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

[with Lars Bülow and Andrin Büchler] Das Konzept des sprachlichen Marktes am Beispiel der Deutschschweiz. In Marlene Hartinger and Stephan Elspass (eds.) Tagungsband des 7. Kongress der IGDD.

[with Juan Manuel Hernández-Campoy] Principios geolingüísticos para el estudio de la variación diatópica. In Isabel Molina Martos, Esther Hernández, Pedro Martín Butrageño y Eva Mendieta (eds.), Caminos y palabras. Estudios de variación lingüística dedicados a Pilar García Mouton. Valencia: Tirant Humanidades.

[with Kazuko Matsumoto] A panel study of language obsolescence: The fate of (g) in a Pacific Japanese colonial koine. In Karen Beaman and Isabelle Buchstaller (eds.), Connecting the individual and the community: contributions from sociolinguistic panel research. London: Routledge. 

 
2023

[with Andrin Büchler] Is there anybody there?: a century of human pronominal quantifier variation in Norwich. I Christian Braun & Elisabeth Scherr (eds.), Variabilität und Wandel: Sprache im Spannungsfeld zwischen System und Gebrauch. Wien: Praesens. 13-24.

[with Rosemary Hall, Hannah Hedegard, Andrea Sudbury, Nicole Holliday and Daniel Schreier] The Sociolinguistics of the Atlantic Englishes. In M. Ball, R. Mesthrie and C. Meluzzi (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Sociolinguistics around the World. London: Routledge. 120-130.

[with Philip Vergeiner, Jan Luttenberger, Lars Bülow, and Dominik Wallner] Revisiting areal and lexical diffusion: the case of Viennese Monophthongization in Austria's traditional dialects. Linguistics. 61 (4) 2023: 915-957.

[with Juan Manuel Hernández-Campoy] 500 years of past BE in East Anglia: a variationist investigation. Roczniki Humanistyczne 71 (6): 103-123
2022

'Urban' and 'rural' in dialectology. In Beatrix Busse and Ingo Warnke (eds.), Handbuch Sprache im urbanen Raum/Hanbook of Language in Urban Space. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. 52-73.

[with Kazuko Matsumoto] (eds.). Diaspora Japanese. Special Issue of International Journal of the Sociology of Language. Volume 273.

Ethnolects, Multiethnolects and urban contact dialects: looking forward, looking back, looking around. In Paul Kerswill and Heike Wiese (eds.), Urban contact dialects and language change: Insights from the global North and South. London: Routledge.

[with Nathan Young and Adrian Leemann] A blueprint for using deepfakes in sociolinguistic matched-guise experiments. Interspeech 2022. ISCA: https://www.isca-archive.org/interspeech_2022/index.html

[with Kazuko Matsumoto] The vernacularity of Palauan Japanese International Journal of the Sociology of Language. 273: 103-144.

[with Kazuko Matsumoto] Diaspora Japanese: Transnational mobility and language contact. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 273: 1-29.
2021

[with Adrian Martin Leemann and Tamsin Blaxter] Dialect levelling in England: evidence from the English Dialects App. In: Thibault, André; Avanzi, Mathieu; Lo Vecchio, Nicolas; Millour, Alice (eds.) Nouveaux regards sur la variation dialectale/New ways of analysing dialectal variation (pp. 305-334). Paris: Éditions de Linguistique et de Philologie.

[with Lars Bülow, Andrin Büchler, Nicolai Rawyler and Christa Schneider] Factors of variation in spoken Swiss Standard German. In Lars Bülow, Alexander Werth, Simone Pfenninger and Markus Schiegg (eds.), Intra-individual variation in language. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

[with Sarah Grossenbacher] Counterurbanisation, dialect contact and the levelling of non-salient traditional dialect variants: The case of the front short vowels in Eastern England. In Arne Ziegler, Stefanie Edler, Nina Kleczkowski and Georg Oberdorfer (eds.), Urban Matters. Current Approaches of International Sociolinguistic Research. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
2020

[with Tam Blaxter] Hands off the metadata!: comparing the use of explicit and background metadata in crowdsourced dialectology. Linguistic Vanguard.

Grammatical variation in the contemporary spoken English of England. (2021) In Andy Kirkpatrick (ed.), The Handbook of World Englishes (fully revised second edition). London: Routledge. 32-58

[with Tam Blaxter and Adrian Leemann] East Anglian English in the English Dialects App. English Today 143 (36:3): 14-30.

[with Kazuko Matsumoto] Japan and the North-Western Pacific. In U. Ansaldo and M. Meyerhoff (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Pidgin and Creole Languages. London: Routledge. 106-131.

[with Sandra Jansen, Justyna Robinson, Lynne Cahill, Adrian Leemann and Tam Blaxter] Sussex by the sea: a descriptive analysis of dialect variation in the south of England based on English Dialect App data. English Today 143 (36: 3): 31-39.

What happened to those relatives from East Anglia?: a multilocality analysis of dialect levelling in the relative marker system. In Karen Beaman, Isabelle Buchstaller, Susan Fox and James Walker (eds), Socio-grammatical Variation and Change: In Honour of Jenny Cheshire. New York: Routledge. 93-114.

Denmark: a perhaps unexpected dialect laboratory. In Marie Maegaard, Malene Monka, Kristine Køhler Mortensen, Andreas Candefors Stæhr (eds.), Patterns of language standardization in the periphery: transversal perspectives.

[with Keiko Hirano] Accommodation and social networks: Grammatical variation among expatriate English speakers in Japan. In Yoshiyuki Asahi (ed.), Proceedings of Methods XVI: Papers from the sixteenth international conference on Methods in Dialectology, 2017. Berlin: Peter Lang.  91-104. 

[with Juan Manuel Hernández Campoy and Juan Antonio Cutillas Espinosa] Variação e competência sociolinguísticas no ensino de inglês como língua estrangeira, Revista EntreLínguas 6: 157-175.
2019

[with Christa Schneider and Sarah Grossenbacher] (2019). Quotative variation in Bernese Swiss German. In Juan-Andrés Villena-Ponsoda, Francisco Diaz-Montesinos, Antonio-Manuel Ávila-Muñoz and Matilde Vida-Castro (eds.), Language variation: European Perspectives VII: Selected papers from the Ninth International Conference on Language Variation in Europe (ICLaVE9), Malaga, June 2017. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 191-202.

[with Laura Rupp] (2019). Linguistic perspectives on a variable English morpheme: let’s talk about –s. London: Palgrave.

A sociolinguistic ecology of colonial Britain. In D. Schreier, E. Schneider and M. Hundt (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of World Englishes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 145-159.

[with Kazuko Matsumoto] Pancakes stuffed with sweet bean paste: Food-related lexical borrowings as indicators of the intensity of language contact in the Pacific. In Giuseppe Balirano and Siria Guzzo (eds.), Food Across Cultures: Linguistic Insights in Transcultural Tastes. Palgrave Macmillan: London. 127-167.

[with Keiko Hirano] Accommodation and social networks: Grammatical variation among expatriate English speakers in Japan. In Yoshiyuki Asahi (ed.), Proceedings of Methods XVI: Papers from the sixteenth international conference on Methods in Dialectology, 2017. Berlin: Peter Lang.  91-104.

[with Juan Manuel Hernández Campoy and Juan Antonio Cutillas Espinosa] Variação e competência sociolinguísticas no ensino de inglês como língua estrangeira, Revista EntreLínguas 6: 157-175.

[with P. Strycharczuk, G. Brown and A. Leemann] (2019). Investigating FOOT-STRUT in Northern Englishes using crowdsourced data.  Proceedings of the ICPhS 2019, 1337-1341.

[With A. Leemann, T. Blaxter and K. Earnshaw (2019). The FACE of Change in English Dialects: 1950 v 20118. Proceedings of ICPhS 2019, 373-377.

[with Yvette Bürki] Plus ça change. In Etna Krakenberger, Aline Kunz and Silvia Natale (eds.), Esercizi di fantalinguistica. Pisa: Pacini. 153-156.

[With A. Leemann, T. Blaxter and K. Earnshaw (2019). The FACE of Change in English Dialects: 1950 v 20118. Proceedings of ICPhS 2019, 373-377.

[with Crispin Thurlow] Voice work: Learning about and from dialect coaches. In Crispin Thurlow (ed.), The business of words: wordsmiths, linguists and other language workers. London: Routledge. 67-85.
2018

Beyond the ‘gentry aesthetic’: elites, Received Pronunciation and the dialectological gaze in England. In Crispin Thurlow and Adam Jaworski (eds.), Elite Discourse: The rhetorics of status, privilege and power. London: Routledge. 46-56.

[with Adrian Leemann and Marie-José Kolly]. The English Dialects App: The creation of a crowdsourced dialect corpus. Ampersand 5: 1-17.

[with Adrian Leemann and Marie-José Kolly] Using impact to make impact? Experiences from a dialect crowdsourcing project. In Dan Macintyre and Hazel Price (eds.), Applying Linguistics: Language and the Impact Agenda. London: Routledge, 83-98.

Dialect contact and new dialect formation. In Charles Boberg, John Nerbonne and Dominic Watt (eds.), Handbook of Dialectology. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. 143-158.

Review of “Rachel Hendry (2015). One man is an island: The speech community William Marsters begat on Palmerston Island. London: Battlebridge”. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages. 33: 226-230.

Paris: a sociolinguistic comparative perspective. Journal of French Language Studies 28: 291-300.
2017

Beyond the ‘gentry aesthetic’: elites, Received Pronunciation and the dialectological gaze in England. Social Semiotics 27 (3): 288-298.

Language, mobility and scale in South and Central Asia: a commentary. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 247: 127-137.

Which way to look?: Perspectives on “Urban” and “Rural” in dialectology. In Emma Moore and Chris Montgomery (eds.) A Sense of Place: Studies in Language and Region. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 171-188.

[with Susan Fox] (2017). Ask a linguist: Why is there a split between 'a' and 'an' in English determiners? Babel 19: 19.

[with Peter Trudgill] Reallocation as an outcome of dialect contact: three examples from East Anglia. In Juan Manuel Hernandez Campoy, Rosa Manchon, Juan Antonio Cutillas Espinosa and Flor Mena (eds.). Festschrift for Prof Rafael Monroy. Murcia: University of Murcia Press.

2016

Sedentarism, nomadism and the sociolinguistics of dialect. In Nikolas Coupland (ed.), Sociolinguistics: Theoretical Debates. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 217-241.
 
[with Allan Bell and Devyani Sharma] (eds.) Labov and Sociolinguistics: Fifty Years of Language in Social Context. Special issue of Journal of Sociolinguistics Volume 20 (4). Oxford: Wiley.
 
[with Allan Bell and Devyani Sharma] Labov in Sociolinguistics: an introduction. Journal of Sociolinguistics 20: 399-408.
 
[with Allan Bell, Bonnie McIlhenny, Joseph Park and Devyani Sharma] How to get published in the Journal of Sociolinguistics. Journal of Sociolinguistics 20: 3-5.
 
[with Andrew Radford, Martin Atkinson, Harald Clahsen and Andrew Spencer] Introduccion a la linguistica (second edition). Madrid: Ediciones Akal.
 
[with Adrian Leemann, Marie-José Kolly, Ross Purves and Elvira Glaser] Crowdsourcing language change with smartphone applications. PlosOne 11 (1): e0143060. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0143060
 
[with Adrian Leemann, Marie-José Kolly]. English Dialects: an English dialect application for the smartphone.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/english-dialects/id882340404?l=de&mt=8&ign-mpt=uo%3D8 
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ch.uk_regional
 
[with Siria Guzzo] (eds.) Languaging Diversity: Volume 2: Sociolinguistics and Identity. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars.
 
[with Siria Guzzo] Languaging Identities: an Introduction. In Siria Guzzo and David Britain (eds.), Languaging Diversity: Volume 2: Sociolinguistics and Identity. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars.
 
[with Keiko Hirano] Accommodation, dialect contact and grammatical variation: Verbs of obligation in the Anglophone community in Japan. In Olga Timofeeva, Anne Gardner and Alpo Honkapohja (eds.), New approaches to English Linguistics: Building Bridges. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 13-33.

Dialect contact and new dialect formation. In Dominic Watt, John Nerbonne and Charles Boberg (eds.), Handbook of Dialectology. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell.

Which way to look?: Perspectives on “Urban” and “Rural” in dialectology. In Emma Moore and Chris Montgomery (eds.) A Sense of Place: Studies in Language and Region. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Language, mobility and scale in South and Central Asia: a commentary. International Journal of the Sociology of Language.

[with Keiko Hirano] Accommodation, dialect contact and grammatical variation: Verbs of obligation in the Anglophone community in Japan. In Olga Timofeeva, Anne Gardner and Alpo Honkapohja (eds.), Building Bridges: Methodology, Corpora, and Globality in English Linguistics. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

2015

Between North and South: The Fenland. In Raymond Hickey (ed.). Researching Northern English. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 417-435.

[with Kazuko Matsumoto] Palauan English. In Jeff Williams, Edgar Schneider, Peter Trudgill and Daniel Schreier (eds.). Further Studies in the Lesser Known Varieties of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 305-343.

[with Adrian Leemann, Marie-José Kolly, Ross Purves and Elvira Glaser] Documenting sound change with smartphone apps. Journal of the Acoustic Society of America 137 (4): 2304.

2014

[with Adrian Leemann, Marie-José Kolly, Iwar Werlen and Dieter Studer-Joho] The diffusion of /l/-vocalization in Swiss German. Language Variation and Change 26: 191-218.

Where North meets South?: contact, divergence, and the routinisation of the Fenland dialect boundary. In Dominic Watt and Carmen Llamas (eds.), Languages, borders and identity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 27-43.

2013

Space, diffusion and mobility. In Jack Chambers and Natalie Schilling (eds.), Handbook of Language Variation and Change (second edition). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. 471-500.

The role of mundane mobility and contact in dialect death and dialect birth. In D Schreier and M Hundt (eds.), English as a contact language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 165-181.

Geographical dialectology. In Janet Holmes and Kirk Hazen (eds.), Research Methods in Sociolinguistics. Oxford: Wiley. 246-261.

[with Andrea Sudbury] Falkland Island English. In Bernd Kortmann and Kerstin Lunkenheimer (eds.) The Mouton World Atlas of Variation in English. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 669-676.

2012

Innovation diffusion in sociohistorical linguistics. In J. M. Hernandez Campoy and J. C. Conde Silvestre (eds.), Handbook of Historical Sociolinguistics. Oxford: Blackwell. 451-464.

Diffusion. In A Bergs and L Brinton (eds.), English Historical Linguistics: An International Handbook. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 2031-2043.

Koineization and cake baking: Reflections on methods in dialect contact research. In Andrea Ender, Adrian Leemann and Bernhard Wälchli (eds.), Methods in Contemporary Linguistics. Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton. 219-238.

Countering the urbanist agenda in variationist sociolinguistics: dialect contact, demographic change and the rural-urban dichotomy. In Hansen, Sandra, Christian Schwarz, Philipp Stoeckle and Tobias Streck (eds.), Dialectological and folk dialectological concepts of space. Berlin: de Gruyter. 12-30.

English in England. In Raymond Hickey (ed.), Areal features of the Anglophone World. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 23-52.

[with Kazuko Matsumoto] Palauan English as a newly emerging postcolonial variety in the Pacific. Language, Information, Text 19: 137-167.

[with Annette Kern-Stähler] (eds.).English on the Move : Mobilities in Literature and Language. Tübingen: Narr.

[with Annette Kern-Stähler] Introduction. In Annette Kern-Stähler and David Britain (eds.).English on the Move : Mobilities in Literature and Language. Tübingen: Narr. 11-15.

2011

2010

[with Allan Bell, Monica Heller and Lionel Wee] How to get published in the Journal of Sociolinguistics. Journal of Sociolinguistics 15: 3-5.

The heterogenous homogenisation of dialects in England. Taal en Tongval 63: 43-60.

Conceptualisations of geographic space in linguistics. In Alfred Lameli, Roland Kehrein and Stefan Rabanus (eds.),Language and Space: An International Handbook of Linguistic Variation. Volume 2: Language Mapping. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. 69-97.

Dialectology. In K Malmkjaer (ed.), Encyclopaedia of Linguistics. London: Routledge. 127-133.

[with Andrea Sudbury] South Atlantic Ocean: Falkland Island English. In Daniel Schreier, Peter Trudgill, Edgar Schneider and Jeffrey Williams (eds). Lesser Known Englishes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 209-223.

Supralocal Regional Dialect Levelling. In C Llamas and D Watt (eds.) Language and identities. Edinburgh University Press. 193-204.

Contact and dialectology. In R Hickey (ed.). Handbook of Language Contact. Oxford: Blackwell. 208-229.

Grammatical variation in the contemporary spoken English of England. In Andy Kirkpatrick (ed.), The Handbook of World Englishes. London: Routledge. 37-58.

Dialect contact, focusing and phonological rule complexity: the koineisation of Fenland English. In Miriam Meyerhoff and Erik Schleef (eds.), The Sociolinguistics Reader. London: Routledge. 231-247.

Foreword. In Barry Heselwood and Clive Upton (eds.), Methods in Dialectology: Proceedings of the 2008 International Conference. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. xi.

2009

[with Andrew Radford, Martin Atkinson, Harald Clahsen and Andrew Spencer] Linguistics: An Introduction. (Revised Second Edition) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Language and space: the variationist approach. In P. Auer and J. Schmidt (eds.), Language and space: an international handbook of linguistic variation. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 142-162.

[with Susan Fox] The Regularisation of the Hiatus Resolution System in British English: A Contact-Induced ‘Vernacular Universal’? In Markku Filppula, Juhani Klemola and Heli Paulasto (eds.) Vernacular Universals and Language Contacts: Evidence from Varieties of English and Beyond. London: Routledge. 177-205.

[with Reinhild Vandekerckhove and Willy Jongenburger] (eds.). Dialect Death in Europe? Special double issue of International Journal of the Sociology of Language, Volume 196-197.

One foot in the grave?: Dialect death, dialect contact and dialect birth in England. In David Britain, Reinhild Vandekerckhove and Willy Jongenburger, (eds.), Dialect Death in Europe? Special Issue of International Journal of the Sociology of Language 196/197: 121-155.

[with Reinhild Vandekerckhove] Dialects in western Europe: a balanced picture of language death, innovation and change. In David Britain, Reinhild Vandekerckhove and Willy Jongenburger, (eds.), Dialect Death in Europe? Special Issue of International Journal of the Sociology of Language 196/197: 1-6.

‘Big bright lights’ versus ‘green and pleasant land’? The unhelpful dichotomy of ‘urban’ v ‘rural’ in dialectology. In E Al-Wer and R de Jong (eds.) Arabic dialectology. Leiden: Brill. 223-248.

2008

When is a change not a change?: a case study on the dialect origins of New Zealand English. Language Variation and Change 20: 187-223.

[with Andrea Sudbury] What can the Falkland Islands tell us about Diphthong Shift? Essex Research Reports in Linguistics 57 (1): 1-32.

 

On the wrong track? A non-standard history of non-standard /au/ in English. Essex Research Reports in Linguistics 57 (1): 33-77.

 

The importance of 'elsewhere': Looking beyond London and Ireland in the creation of Australian English. Essex Research Reports in Linguistics 57 (1): 79-114.

[with Sue Fox] “Vernacular universals” and the regularisation of the hiatus resolution system in British English. Essex Research Reports in Linguistics 57 (3): 1-42.

Innovation diffusion, ‘Estuary English’ and local dialect differentiation:

the survival of Fenland Englishes. In Nikolaus Coupland and Adam Jaworski (eds.), Sociolinguistics: Critical Concepts in Linguistics: Volume 1. London: Routledge. 192-217.

2007

(Ed.) Language in the British Isles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Introduction. In D Britain (ed.) Language in the British Isles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1-6.

Grammatical variation in England. In D Britain (ed.) Language in the British Isles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 75-104.

[with Wyn Johnson] L-vocalisation as a Natural Phenomenon:

Explorations in Sociophonology. Language Sciences 29: 294-315.

[with Claudia Felser] Deconstructing what with absolutes. In A Radford (ed.) Martin Atkinson – the Minimalist Muse: Special issue of Essex Research Reports in Linguistics. 53: 97-134.

Review of “Edgar Schneider, Kate Burridge, Bernd Kortmann, Rajend Mesthrie and Clive Upton (eds.) (2004). A Handbook of Varieties of English: Volume 1: Phonology; Volume 2: Morphosyntax; CD-ROM. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter”. Journal of Linguistics 43 (3): 742-746.

Review of “Daniel Schreier (2005). Consonant change in English Worldwide. Basingstoke: Palgrave”. English World-Wide 28 (3): 332-339.

2006

Language/Dialect Contact. In Keith Brown (ed.) Encyclopaedia of Language and Linguistics (second edition): Volume 6. Oxford: Elsevier. 651-656.

[with Kazuko Matsumoto] Palau: Language Situation. In Keith Brown (ed.) Encyclopaedia of Language and Linguistics (second edition): Volume 9. Oxford: Elsevier. 129-130.

2005

Innovation diffusion, ‘Estuary English’ and local dialect differentiation:

the survival of Fenland Englishes. Linguistics 43 (5): 995-1022.

[with Kazuko Matsumoto] Language, Communities, Networks and Practices. In Martin Ball (ed.) Clinical Sociolinguistics. Oxford: Blackwell. 3-14.

[with Peter Trudgill] New dialect formation and contact-induced reallocation: three case studies from the Fens. International Journal of English Studies 5 (1): 183-209.

Where did New Zealand English come from? In Allan Bell, Ray Harlow and Donna Starks (eds.) The Languages of New Zealand. Wellington: Victoria University Press. 156-193.

The Dying Dialects of England? In Antonio Bertacca (ed.) Historical linguistic studies of spoken English. Pisa: Edizioni Plus. 35-46.

2004

Geolinguistics – Diffusion of Language. In Ulrich Ammon, Norbert Dittmar, Klaus Mattheier and Peter Trudgill (eds.) Sociolinguistics: International Handbook of the Science of Language and Society, Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter. 34-48.

Dialect and Accent. In Ulrich Ammon, Norbert Dittmar, Klaus Mattheier and Peter Trudgill (eds.) Sociolinguistics: International Handbook of the Science of Language and Society, Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter. 267-273.

2003

(ed.) [with Jenny Cheshire] Social Dialectology: in honour of Peter Trudgill. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

[with Jenny Cheshire] Introduction. In David Britain and Jenny Cheshire (eds.) Social Dialectology. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 1-8.

Exploring the importance of the outlier in sociolinguistic dialectology. In David Britain and Jenny Cheshire (eds.) Social Dialectology. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 191-208.

[with Kazuko Matsumoto] Language choice and cultural hegemony in the Western Pacific: Linguistic symbols of domination and resistance in the Republic of Palau. In Daniel Nelson and Mirjana Dedaic (eds.) At war with words. Berlin: Mouton. 315-358.

[with Kazuko Matsumoto] The sociolinguistic ‘gender paradox’: a case study from a small multilingual island in the Pacific’ International Journal of Bilingualism. 7: 127-152.

[with Wyn Johnson] L Vocalisation as a naturally occurring phenomenon. Essex Research Reports in Linguistics 44: 1-37

[with Kazuko Matsumoto] Contact and obsolescence in a diaspora variety of Japanese: The case of Palau in Micronesia. Essex Research Reports in Linguistics 44: 38-75.

2002

Diffusion, levelling, simplification and reallocation in past tense BE in the

English Fens. Journal of sociolinguistics 6 (1): 16-43.

Space and spatial diffusion. In Jack Chambers, Peter Trudgill and Natalie Schilling-Estes (eds.) The Handbook of Variation and Change. Oxford:

Blackwell. 603-637.

[with Andrea Sudbury] There's sheep and there's penguins: 'Drift', ‘slant’ and singular verb forms following existentials in New Zealand and Falkland Island English. In Mari Jones and Edith Esch (eds.) Language Change: The Interplay of Internal, External and Extra-linguistic Factors. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 209-242.

The British history of New Zealand English? Essex Research Reports in Linguistics 41: 1-41.

Phoenix from the ashes?: The death, contact and birth of dialects in England. Essex Research Reports in Linguistics 41: 42-73.

Surviving 'Estuary English': innovation diffusion, koineisation and local dialect differentiation in the English Fenland. Essex Research Reports in Linguistics 41: 74-103

Dialectology. In David Bickerton (ed.), A Web Guide to Teaching and Learning in Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies. Southampton: Subject Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies. http://www.llas.ac.uk/resources/gpg/964

[Updated January 2005].

Sociolinguistic Variation. In David Bickerton (ed.), A Web Guide to Teaching and Learning in Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies. Southampton: Subject Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies. http://www.llas.ac.uk/resources/gpg/1054

[Updated January 2005]

2001

Where did it all start?: dialect contact, the ‘Founder Principle’ and the so-called (-own) split in New Zealand English. Transactions of the Philological Society.99: 1-27.

Welcome to East Anglia!: two major dialect ‘boundaries’ in the Fens. In Peter Trudgill and Jacek Fisiak (eds.) East Anglian English. Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer. 217-242.

Review of Paul Foulkes and Gerard Docherty (eds.) (1999) Urban Voices. London: Arnold. English World-wide 22 (1): 121-128.

Dialect contact and past BE in the English Fens Essex Research Reports in Linguistics 38: 1-38

If A changes to B, make sure A exists: a case study on the dialect origins of New Zealand English. Essex Research Reports in Linguistics 38 : 39-79.

[with Kazuko Matsumoto] Conservative and innovative behaviour by female speakers in a multilingual Micronesian society. Essex Research Reports in Linguistics 38: 80-106.

2000

[with Andrew Radford, Martin Atkinson, Harald Clahsen and Andrew Spencer] Introduccion a la linguistica. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

[with Peter Trudgill] Migration, dialect contact, new dialect formation and reallocation. In Klaus Mattheier (ed.) Dialect and migration in a changing Europe. Franfurt: Peter Lang. 73-78.

[with Andrea Sudbury] There's sheep and there's penguins: 'Drift' and the use of singular verb forms of BE in plural existential clauses in New Zealand and Falkland Island English. Essex research reports in linguistics. 28: 1-32

[with Andrea Sudbury] Is Falkland Island English linguistically a southern hemisphere variety?. Essex research reports in linguistics. 28: 33-59.

The difference that space makes: an evaluation of the application of human geographic thought in sociolinguistic dialectology. Essex research reports in linguistics. 29: 38-82.

[with Kazuko Matsumoto] Hegemonic diglossia and pickled radish: symbolic domination and resistance in the trilingual Republic of Palau. Essex research reports in linguistics. 29: 1-37.

1999

[with Andrew Radford, Martin Atkinson, Harald Clahsen and Andrew Spencer] Linguistics: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

As far as analysing grammatical variation and change in New Zealand English with relatively few tokens <is concerned/¯>. In Allan Bell and Koenraad Kuiper (eds.) Focus on New Zealand English. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 198-220

[with Paul Warren] Prosody in New Zealand English. In Allan Bell and Koenraad Kuiper (eds.) Focus on New Zealand English. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 146-172.

Locating the baseline of linguistic innovations: dialect contact, the Founder Principle and the so-called (-own) split in New Zealand English In J C Conde Silvestre and J M Hernandez Campoy (eds.) Variation and Linguistic Change in English: Diachronic and Synchronic Studies. Special Issue of Cuadernos de Filologia Inglesa (vol. 8). 177-192.

[with Peter Trudgill] Migration, new-dialect formation and sociolinguistic refunctionalisation: reallocation as an outcome of dialect contact. Transactions of the Philological Society 97: 2 245-256.

Review of Marie Louise Moreau (ed.). (1997). Sociolinguistique: concepts de base. Hayen: Mardaga. Journal of Sociolinguistics 3-4: 584.

1998

Linguistic Change in Intonation: the use of High Rising Terminals in New Zealand English. In P Trudgill and J Cheshire (eds.) The Sociolinguistics Reader: Volume 1: Multilingualism and Variation. London: Arnold. pp213-239.

Review of Donn Bayard (1995) Kiwitalk: Sociolinguistics and New Zealand Society. Palmerston North: Dunmore Press. In The Journal of the Polynesian Society 107 (1): 79-80.

A little goes a long way, as far as analysing grammatical variation and change in New Zealand English <is concerned/Ø>. Essex Research Reports in Linguistics 21: 1-32.

High Rising Terminals in New Zealand English: Who uses them, when and why? Essex Research Reports in Linguistics 21: 33-58.

[with Janet Holmes] (1998) Sex, Sound Symbolism and Sociolinguistics: a reply to Gordon and Heath. Current Anthropology 39 (4) 442.

1997

Dialect Contact and Phonological Reallocation: 'Canadian Raising' in the English Fens. Language in Society 26: 15-46.

Dialect Contact, focusing and phonological rule complexity: the koineisation of Fenland English. In C Boberg, M Meyerhoff and S Strassel (eds.) A Selection of Papers from NWAVE 25. Special issue of University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics. 4 (1): 141-170.

Review of C Upton and J Widdowson (1996) An Atlas of English Dialects. Oxford: Oxford University Press. The Times Higher Education Supplement. May 2nd 1997.

(ongoing) [with Jack Chambers] Accents and Dialects. In A Zwicky and R Hudson (eds) Contemporary English. Volume 105 of Annotated Bibliography for English Studies. Lisse, Netherlands: Swets and Zeitlinger.

1995

Review of Suzanne Romaine (1994) Language in Society: An Introduction to Sociolinguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. S ociolinguistica 9: 147-149.

Review of Donn Bayard (1995) Kiwitalk: Sociolinguistics and New Zealand Society. Palmerston North: Dunmore Press. New Zealand Books 6 (2): 1-5

The Sociolinguistic Development of Canadian Raising in the English Fens. Essex Research Reports in Linguistics 5: 1-53.

1992

Linguistic Change in Intonation: the use of High Rising Terminals in New Zealand English. Language Variation and Change 4, 77-104.

High Rising Terminals in New Zealand English. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 22, 1-11 [with John Newman].

Research

Research interests

My research interests are in the following areas:

  • Variation and change in contemporary English, especially the Englishes of East Anglia, the South of England, the Southern Hemisphere (esp. New Zealand, Australia and the Falkland Islands) and Micronesia, as well as lesser-known varieties of English;
  • The dialectological consequences of geographical mobility, especially dialect contact, dialect accommodation, diffusion, supralocalisation, second dialect acquisition, koineisation and new dialect formation;
  • The dialectology – human geography interface, especially with respect to mobility, isolation and the urban-rural dichotomy;
  • Language variation 'on the move': mobile methods in variationist sociolinguistics and the effects of walking, driving, travelling on variation;
  • Language ideologies as they relate to non-standard dialects;
  • Language and dialect obsolescence.
  • ​Dialectological data collection using mobile phone apps.

 

Editorial Responsibilities

Dave is on the editorial board of the Journal of Linguistic Geography, English Language and Linguistics, English World-Wide, the International Journal of English Studies and Babel. Dave was an Associate Editor of the Journal of Sociolinguistics from 2008 to 2017.

Projects

  • "MovIt Moving Italian(s): Standard language change among moving Italians" [with Silvia Natale, Stefano De Pascale, Stefania Marzo] (March 2024-February 2025). Swiss National Science Foundation - Project Partner. When people migrate, their language moves with them. So far, sociolinguistics has focused primarily on the language of working class migrants, paying particular attention to non-standard phenomena. Hardly any research has been conducted on the evolution of the standard language of highly educated speakers who leave the homeland. The project addresses these research gaps by using a crowdsourcing application (SPEAK-IT!) to investigate how standard language norms acquired in the home country evolve in the repertoires of highly educated Italians living abroad. These 'elite' migrants represent an ideal test case, since they are assumed to master the two standard norms that characterize contemporary Italian: a literary standard and a so-called neostandard Italian. The emergence of the latter variety is to be understood against the background of de- and re-standardization dynamics attested in many European standard languages. This project examines standard language change outside of Italy by comparing language production and language perception in terms of the duration of migration of the speakers. Data collection in Switzerland and Belgium will be combined with control data collected in Italy.
  • "Are physically attractive people leaders of linguistic change?" [with Prof Adrian Leemann] (March 2020-February 2021). Swiss National Science Foundation - co-researcher Dr Nate Young. This research project will investigate the influence of conventional beauty on the transmission of linguistic innovations in a community. When linguistic innovations spread throughout a community, the conduits are the momentary interactions between two speakers. In these situations, interlocutors will typically align (or disalign) with one another’s speech. This process is referred to as accommodation (Giles & Ogay 2007). The accumulation of speech-accommodation events facilitates the cognitive embedding of certain innovations, which solidifies their (re)production among speakers in a community. Research has shown that social factors can influence whether two interlocutors accommodate each other’s speech including nationality, race, social status, dialect attitude, and relationship strength. However, no study has examined the effects of physical attractiveness, despite the fact that research has shown it to be influential in many other domains (e.g., purchasing decisions or teacher assessments of students). In this project we will use experimental approaches using innovative technologies to address this question.
  • "Dialect at the fairground: mobility and language variation among a nomadic British community". November 2018 - October 2022. Swiss National Science Foundation - co-researcher Sarah Grossenbacher. This project aims to investigate the previously undescribed English variety spoken by Travelling Showpeople in England. English dialectology has tended to shun nomadic speakers since they are often not deemed to represent 'authentic' speakers of a place. Despite the existence of various nomadic groups in England, there has always been a strong focus in dialectology on geographical continuity and local embeddedness, although studies of non-local mobile members of communities have highlighted their importance in influencing and understanding language change. The Travelling Showpeople are a relatively isolated community with a distinctive lifestyle. Analysing their dialect will enable us to theorise to what extent such speakers are able to acquire sedentary dialect norms and how language change enters such communities and is transmitted from one generation to the next. 
  • "English in paradise?: emergent varieties in Micronesia". January 2015 - December 2017. Swiss National Science Foundation - co-researchers Dr Dominique Hess, Sara Lynch and Dr Tobias Leonhardt. This project investigates the emergent structures of and the similarities and differences between the new Englishes developing in three Micronesian territories: the Federated States of Micronesia, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands and Kiribati. Dr Eva Kuske and Laura Mettler are, in addition, working alongside the project team to examine the Englishes of Guam and Nauru respectively. See http://english-in-micronesia.weebly.com/ for more information. Some of my other PhD students are working on further 'lesser known' varieties of English, namely on the Cocos Keeling Islands (Dr Hannah Hedegard) and Tonga (Danielle Tod).
  • "Language contact in the Republic of Palau, Micronesia" - co-researcher Prof. Kazuko Matsumoto (University of Tokyo). In this project, we investigate the consequences of Palau's colonial contact with both Japanese and English, examining koineisation, borrowing and language obsolescence in the case of Palauan Japanese, and nativisation and the emergence of a new postcolonial variety in the case of Palauan English. 
  • "Crowdsourcing dialect data: the English Dialect App" (co-researchers Dr. Adrian Leemann, Dr Marie-Jose Kolly, Daniel Wanitsch, Dr Tamsin Blaxter, Sarah Grossenbacher, Melanie Calame). This research is developing an interactive app which engages users to think and learn about their own language variation, and collects dialect data from recordings and a questionnaire. You can find out more about this project, by watching this presentation I gave in Gent in Belgium in March 2018: http://www.dlld.ugent.be/19-mar-2018-david-britain-bern-discovering-dialect-with-mobile-phone-apps/
  • "Morphosyntactic variation in East Anglian English" (co-researcher Dr Laura Rupp, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam). Having together published Linguistic perspectives on a variable English morpheme: let’s talk about –s (London: Palgrave, 2019), Laura and I are now conducting empirical analyses of verbal morphology in East Anglia, examining the effects of, for example, subject type and subject animacy on verbal marking.
  • "The linguistic consequences of counterurbanisation". This project examines the consequences for East Anglian dialects of English of decades of demographic in-migration from London and the South-East of England. Examining both phonological and morphological variables, the project highlights not only the dramatic scale of traditional dialect levelling, but also, because levelling was found to be most extreme in the more rural areas of the region, questions existing models of linguistic innovation diffusion. This research has also enabled me to work with a large number of colleagues (including Prof. Peter Trudgill, Dr Laura Rupp, Dr Jenny Amos, Dr Sue Baker, Dr Wyn Johnson, Dr Rob Potter, Kerri-Ann Butcher and Michelle Bray) on individual features of East Anglian English. 
  • “Contact, mobility and authenticity: language ideologies in koineisation and creolisation”. August 2013 - July 2016. Swiss National Science Foundation - co-researchers Dr Christoph Neuenschwander and Dr Laura Tresch. This project examines how the process by which new language varieties, such as pidgins, creoles and koines, with roots in acts of mobility, become, in public and media discourses, legitimised and authenticised. The project is examining two creoles (Tok Pisin and Hawai'ian Creole English) and two koines (New Zealand English and Estuary English).
  • "Language variation and change in the Falkland Islands" (co-researchers Dr Andrea Sudbury and Dr Hannah Hedegard). This research examines phonological and morpho-syntactic variation and change in the English of the Falkland Islands, and considers how this variety emerged, given its roots in the British settler dialects of the 19th century.​ Andrea's corpus from the late 1990s has now been supplemented by a new corpus of Falkland Island English collected by Hannah in early 2020, and supported with funding from the Berner Forschungsstiftung.
  • "Where North meets South: Dialect boundaries in the Fens". For over two decades now, I have been investigating the nature of the dialect transition zone that straddles the Fens in Eastern England. This is the site of a number of major dialect boundaries, including for features that are said to divide the linguistic 'north' and 'south' of England, such as the realisation of the STRUT and BATH vowels. I have been exploring not only the linguistic manifestations of the transition by considering a number of grammatical and phonological features, but also how the border originally emerged and why it remains to this day.