Guest Lecture by Prof. Dr. Raymond Hickey: "Using early audio records to track language change"

In recent years linguists have become increasingly interested in ‘bad data’, i.e. early fragmentary data from audio or vernacular written sources (Hickey 2017, 2019), which can tell us something about how languages and their varieties developed previously and hence add to our knowledge of how language change works. From this perspective I will examine recordings of English speakers from the beginning of the twentieth century to show how British English gradually developed towards its present form. With the help of modern digital technology it has become possible to accurately trace changes in the pronunciation of Received Pronunciation (Cruttenden 2014) and of varieties in other countries beyond Britain. The nature of these changes in different parts of the English-speaking world help to throw light on the regular nature of language change.

References

Cruttenden, Alan 2014. Gimson’s Pronunciation of English. Eighth edition. London: Hodder Education.
Hickey, Raymond (ed.) 2017. Listening to the Past. Audio Records of Accents of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hickey, Raymond (ed.) 2019. Keeping in Touch. Familiar Letters across the English-speaking World. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Raymond Hickey is Adjunct Professor at the University of Limerick and Professor Emeritus of English Linguistics at the University of Duisburg and Essen. His main research interests are varieties of English, Late Modern English and general questions of language contact, variation and change. Recent book publications include A Dictionary of Varieties of English (Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), Researching Northern English (John Benjamins, 2015), Sociolinguistics in Ireland (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), Listening to the Past. Audio Records of Accents of English (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Keeping in Touch. Familiar Letters across the English-speaking World (John Benjamins, 2019), The Handbook of Language Contact (Wiley-Blackwell, 2020), English in Multilingual South Africa. The linguistics of contact and change (Cambridge University Press, 2020), English in the German-Speaking World (Cambridge University Press, 2020) Life and Language Beyond Earth (Cambridge University Press, 2023). He is also the general editor of the New Cambridge History of the English Language (Cambridge University Press, 2025).