I studied English, German, and History at the University of Duisburg-Essen, graduating with a master’s degree in English linguistics. In my MA thesis, “Multicultural London English. The new London voice in the mirror of different channels.”, I explored the notion of authenticity in scripted performances of Multicultural London English (MLE), focusing mainly on grime songs and independent British films. 

Currently, I am mainly concerned with exploring and analysing UDE Corpus of Grime (UCG) data, a fully annotated and part-of-speech-tagged 2.5 million word corpus of over 3.000 grime songs I created for my PhD research project entitled “Working title: UDE Grime Project”. Overall, the project has three distinct aims:

(a) to examine how identity and street credibility are constructed by using varying degrees of vernacularity and to explore the interplay of authenticity, identity and youth-street styles, particularly in the context of a largely DIY music production scheme,

(b) to assess the extent to which the genre’s linguistic repertoire draws on Multicultural London English and Multicultural Urban British English and vice versa, and

(c) to propose a reproducible analytical framework for exploring MC-led musical genres.