The Modern RP Page
Anne H. Fabricius
Associate Professor of English
Language
Department of Culture and Identity (CUID)
Roskilde University
Denmark
NEW! Our co-edited
CALPIU book, published by leading publisher Multilingual Matters (as of 15 July
2011):
Preisler,
Bent, Ida Klitgård and Anne Fabricius, eds. 2011. Language
and Learning in the International University: From English Uniformity to
Diversity and Hybridity. Clevedon:
Multilingual Matters (to appear in August)
SOCIOLINGUISTIC RESEARCH
I trained
as a linguist in Australia (University of Queensland, Australian National
University) and Denmark (Copenhagen Business School). For an introduction to
the field of Linguistics, see the Linguistic Society of America’s homepage here. My
own original primary research area is Quantitative Sociolinguistics and
Sociophonetics, aimed at describing and explaining sociophonetic variation and
change processes (both from subjective
and objective perspectives) in modern RP in the sociolinguistic landscape of
the UK. My Ph.D. was a study of patterns in the pronunciations of word-final /t/
by upper middle class young adults in England. They were following their peers
from other social backgrounds in no longer treating the ‘glottal stop’ for
word-final t (as in words like not or
that) as a socially ‘shameful’ way to
speak, and this had consequences for their linguistic behaviour. Since then, I
have mostly worked on variation in their vowel pronunciations (e.g. in my
publication in the Journal of the
International Phonetic Association in 2007). Arising from these studies, I
also have a keen interest in developing normalisation and visual representation
methodology for sociophonetic studies, mainly in cooperation with Dominic
Watt at the University of York in the UK, and Tyler
Kendall (University of Oregon) in the US, but also in dialogue with
other sociolinguists with an interest in the field, such as Alicia Wassink and Malcah Yaeger-Dror.
CALPIU: Cultural and Linguistic
Practices in the International University
My second major research area is in work examining
internationalization processes and the multilingual landscape of Danish Higher
Education and in workplaces in general. Denmark’s Higher Education landscape is
currently (and has been for a while) in a process of transformation and
reconfiguration from being a more national-focussed sector to being more
internationally oriented, something that has been fostered by political
interests. This is also presently happening all over the EU, as transnational
political, economic and social currents make themselves felt in the local
context. The Bologna Process is just one aspect of this. I am a member of the CALPIU
Research Centre and its Steering Committee, based at Roskilde University, where
I work on project management, data collection, storing and analysis procedures,
as well as on empirical and theoretical aspects of the process of
internationalisation of Danish universities and the sociolinguistic challenges
arising from it. My special interest within this area is within language
ideology and meta-language, where I am interested in looking at the categorizations
and constructs that are put into play in such contexts. The CALPIU Research
Centre has been established with the financial support of the Danish Research Council for the
Humanities, FKK (Forskningsråd for Kultur og Kommunikation),
and runs until 1st
November 2012. We will be holding a CALPIU conference in April 2012 here in
Roskilde. See the
conference call here.
ON QUANTITATIVE SOCIOPHONETICS
The major research
paradigm that I have worked in since 1997 is called “Language Variation and
Change”, “Sociophonetics” “Quantitative sociolinguistics” or even “Labovian
Sociolinguistics” as a reference to its central figure, William
Labov. Its fascination for many people lies in the chance to observe
and analyse the different ways in which different individuals speak, and what
consequences this has in their lives. My own work looks at accentual
(pronunciation) variation and explores its consequences within wider issues
such as ongoing processes of language change, individual identity construction,
language ideology at an interactional level, and the social ramifications of
linguistic variation.
What
is modern RP? And My Ph.D. thesis in PDF format (Fabricius
2000).
Some expert phonetics and sociolinguistics resources can be found here
The
University of York Department of Language and Linguistic Science
Here is one superb site on accent and dialect variation in the UK, hosted
by the British Library
Here are some audio samples you are free to use for teaching purposes:
Interview
speech: (female born 1976)
(male born 1973. Both recorded in 1997/8
Reading
Passage speech: example 1, 2,
3,
4.
All recorded in 2008
Powerpoints
from conference presentations and talks
Essex
2005 Guest lecture, Essex University, UK, 2005
SS15
Conference Presentation,
Methods
12 Conference Presentation,
BAAP
2006 Poster, Edinburgh, 2007
SS16 Conference Presentation,
Handout from SS16 in 2006
Vokalforandring
i ‘virkelig tid’ (a talk in Danish given to the SCALPS
research group at
My poster
presentation at ICPhS Saarbrücken in August 2007 on the short vowel
system of Modern RP and diachronic change
My NWAV36
paper from October 2007 is here. This paper has appeared in Acta Linguistica Hafniensis.
A paper
given at the Sociolinguistics Circle of Copenhagen, September 2008, on normalisation.
Guest lectures given at University of York, 13 November 2008 and
University of Cambridge, 2nd December
2008, on modern RP in real time
My
paper from ICLaVE#5 in Copenhagen, June 2009
Workshop
paper for NWAV38 in Ottawa (without animations; if you would like
the animated version, please email me)
SS18: Beyond
Averages paper, co-authored with Dominic Watt (powerpoint)
SS18: Standard
Language Ideologies paper, co-authored with Janus Mortensen (powerpoint)
ICLaVE#6:
Reflections from the
outside and the inside: construct resources and “modern RP” in interaction,
co-authored Anne Fabricius and Janus Mortensen
On sociophonetic normalisation methodology:
Why do we normalize vowel formant data?
Because individual people’s heads have slightly different sizes, as well
as different proportions between the oral and pharyngeal cavities (the size of
the mouth and the size of the throat), and even differ in for example the
concavity of the palate. Thus, the acoustic properties of the sound wave an
individual person produces when speaking aren’t really directly comparable with
any another individual’s speech unless some form of mathematical normalisation
takes place. We possibly all do a type of daily normalisation in our heads as
well, for example, when we can understand children and adults saying the same
words, even though their voices sound very different. (Not all theoreticians
would agree that that is how it happens: maybe we ‘remember’, subconsciously,
many fine-grained details about the utterances we hear around us, but that is
another story).
Sociolinguists are interested in language change, for instances in differences between the
pronunciation of older and younger speakers. Normalisation is one of the key
procedures you need when you study vowel change, because you have to make sure
that the differences you see between say, older men’s and younger women’s
speech patterns, are really due to generational changes (that is, the younger
generation speaks differently) and not just the fact that men’s and women’s
heads are different sizes. Here are some resources related to my work in this
area:
·
Read more about normalisation procedures and use the Watt and Fabricius
S-centroid procedure, as well as others on this important and highly useful
site by Eric Thomas and Tyler Kendall:
NORM Suite of Normalization Methods
·
Normalization and
Plotting, a powerpoint file from the LSA
institute in Boulder, July 2011. By Anne Fabricius, Tyler Kendall and Dominic
Watt.
Here are some links to recent past and future conferences I have attended
or will be attending:
BAAP
Colloquium, Sheffield, March 30 to April 2, 2008
American
Acoustics Society Conference, ASA08/Eurospeech,
Paris, June 30 to July 4, 2008
CALPIU
08, Roskilde, December 2008
ICLAVE5,
Copenhagen, June 2009
NWAV38, Ottawa
October 2009
Professionalising Multilingualism in Higher Education,
Luxembourg, February 4-6, 2010
Sociolinguistics Symposium 18, Southhampton, 1-4 September 2010
i-mean2, Bristol, April 13th to
15th 2011
ICLaVE6,
Freiburg, June 29-July 1, 2011
CALPIU’12, Roskilde, 1-4 April 2012
RESEARCH COMMUNICATION/KNOWLEDGE
TRANSFER
My fully-updated publications list can be found here on RUCforsk. I
frequently give lectures at conferences and for groups of PhD students. If you
are interested in contacting me about a proposed lecture, please e-mail me (my
contact details are on RUC’s homepage under ‘Søg
person/Find person’).
TEACHING at Roskilde University and
beyond
I teach within the areas of sociolinguistics, applied
linguistics, phonetics, and advanced English for Academic Purposes.
Autumn 2009: MA Phonetics
Spring 2010: English Text and Writing, BA English
Linguistic Analysis
Autumn 2010: MA
Phonetics, Text and Sign (HIB), Basis I and Basis II
for GradEast
Spring 2011: Project supervision at BA and MA levels,
Basis II for Phd Students at SDU
Summer 2011: LSA Institute at University of
Colorado Boulder, at a Sociophonetics workshop.
Autumn 2011: Text and Sign (HIB), MA Phonetics, Basis
I for PhD Students
ADMINISTRATION AND SERVICE
I was Director of Studies for the English
programme (BA and MA) at Roskilde University from 1st
February 2009 to 1st September 2011. I was in 2010 Director of Grad East
(Forskerskole Øst i Sprogvidenskab), the previous
PhD research programme in Linguistics for East Denmark. I am vice-director of
the research group SCALPS at Roskilde University. I am a member of our Departmental Council and
its Job Market consultant group.
Published:
19 July
2011
Visit The Visiting Scholar’s Blog
*** CALPIU transcription test segments are here: ENGLISH,
GERMAN,
DANISH