Research Interests

My areas of expertise:

1. SOCIOLINGUISTICS and SOCIOPHONETICS


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). And I have an ongoing interest in the history of phonetic forms and normative issues to do with these accent varieties. 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.



2. 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 presently 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. I am also interested in how individual academics tackle the challenges and benefits of internationalisation.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 held a CALPIU conference in April 2012 here in Roskilde. Our co-edited CALPIU book was published by Multilingual Matters (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