Note to readers!

I don't use this blog nearly as often as I would like to do.

However, I have profiles on both ResearchGate and Academia.edu, so you can also go to those to see updates on my work.

Or go to my official Roskilde University research site.


Anne

In July I took part in a symposium in Iceland concerned with university internationalization and its linguistic consequences:

http://esperantic.org/en/nitobe2013

Where I've been recently

This week has been taken up with the Calpiu Research Training Course, CRTC'12 in Roskilde. This summer school has been put together with the financial support of NORDFORSK.

See here for details:

http://calpiu.dk/ruc/CRTC12.html


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Last week was dedicated to the Berlin Sociolinguistics Symposium number 19, Europe's largest sociolinguistic gathering with around 800 papers presented.

See here for details:

http://www.sociolinguistics-symposium-2012.de/


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Next week will be devoted to the first AVML conference in York, UK. AVML stands for 'Advances in Visual Methods for Linguistics'.

See here for details:

http://avml2012.wordpress.com/

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A link to my (most systematically-)updated publications list:

http://rucforsk.ruc.dk/site/da/persons/anne-fabricius(36163c8b-af1c-482f-a219-52899f28d4e3)/publications.html

Immensely clumsy, but there it is......If I had time I would put it on a not-long address, but I'm dashing off to do something else. As my husband loves to quote Cicero: "Dear friend, I wanted to send you a short letter, but I don't have time, so I'm sending you a long one...."

Anne

Normalizing using Praat scripting

http://bartus.us/blog/?p=636

Watt and Fabricius normalization done by Praat programming, on Bartek Plichta's Akustyk Blog. There are two parts to this blogpost. See the above link. This version uses W&F as presently presented on the NORM suite. This version corresponds to modified W&F in Fabricius, Watt and Johnson 2009, published in Language Variation and Change.

NORMALISATION of vowel formant data

Why do sociolinguists and sociophoneticians normalize vowel formant data?


Because individual people’s heads have slightly different sizes, as well as different proportions between the oral and pharyngeal cavities (roughly, the size of the mouth vis-à-vis the size of the throat), and even differ in for example the degree of 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 crucially interested in language change, for instance in subtle differences between the pronunciations 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.

For more information about getting started with normalisation, see the following references:

Clopper, Cynthia. 2009. Computational methods for normalization acoustic vowel data for talker differences. Language and Linguistics Compass 3(6): 1430-42. [ Online: Compass ]


Thomas, Erik R. 2011. Sociophonetics: An Introduction. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan


Watt, Dominic, Fabricius, Anne, and Kendall, Tyler. 2011. More on vowels: Plotting and normalization. In Marianna di Paolo and Malcah Yaeger-Dror (eds.), Sociophonetics: A Student's Guide. London: Routledge, 107-118

And see also the NORM suite (Thomas and Kendall 2007): http://ncslaap.lib.ncsu.edu/tools/norm/index.php, which also has a bibliography

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