Contact

Curriculum Vitae

Since April 2018

Postdoctoral researcher in the UDE Sociolinguistics Lab. Current project concerns linguistic variation and change across the lifespan in Newcastle English.

April 2017 to March 2018

Postdoctoral Research Fellow within Prof Rajend Mesthrie’s South African Research Chairs Initiative (SARChI; NRF) project ‘Language, Migration and Social Change’ in the Linguistics Section of the School of African & Gender Studies, Anthropology & Linguistics at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.

April 2014 to March 2017

Technical Officer for Prof Rajend Mesthrie’s SARChI NRF project ‘Language, Migration and Social Change’ in the Linguistics Section of the School of African and Gender Studies, Anthropology and Linguistics at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.

2010-2016

PhD in Linguistics (University of Cape Town)
Thesis: To bry or not to bry: The social meanings of Afrikaans rhotic variation in the South CapeSupervisor: Prof Ana Deumert
Co-supervisor: Prof Rajend Mesthrie

2008-2009

MA in Linguistics (University of Cape Town)
Thesis: Syntactic Variation in Afrikaans: an empirical study
Supervisor: Prof Ana Deumert

2007

BA Honours in Linguistics (University of Cape Town)

2004-2006

BA (University of Cape Town). Majors: Linguistics; English; Art History

1997-2000

BSc in Dietetics (University of Stellenbosch)

Research interests and current projects

Variationist sociolinguistics (specifically production and perception of variation and change in present-day varieties of Afrikaans and South African English), with an interest in incorporating linguistic anthropological approaches to situated, contextually created social meanings through ways of speaking (specifically linguistic ideologies and the discursive constructions of language, place, and belonging). Furthermore, acoustic and articulatory phonetics (specifically of rhotics), and phonological theory (specifically overlap, parallel innovation or sociophonetic transfer in English-Afrikaans bilingual phonologies).

I am currently involved in a linguistic variation and change across the lifespan project in Newcastle English, as part of Prof Isabelle Buchstaller’s Sociolinguistics Lab at the University of Duisburg-Essen.

Since 2017, I am involved in the management of a project led by Prof Heather Brookes (University of Cape Town) that develops MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories for infants and toddlers in five Southern African languages. I co-supervised a Research Masters dissertation based on the isiXhosa data in this project.

I am also currently working with an interdisciplinary team based at the University of Cape Town on planning and funding a project that investigates the ways Capetonian Afrikaans-speakers describe emergency events when calling Emergency Medical Services call centres. One of the objectives of this project is to explore how linguistic findings can assist call centre workers in making triage decisions.

Teaching

Since April 2018

UDE Winter Semester 2018/19, Masters level seminar, English Linguistics: Research methods in socio-cultural linguistics: different approaches to researching urban multilingualism.

UDE Summer Semester 2018, Masters level seminar, English Linguistics: Everyone has an accent: language variation and change with a focus on phonetics.

2007-2017

Tutor in Linguistics (University of Cape Town)

2009-2016

Part-time teaching of modules in undergraduate Linguistic courses (University of Cape Town):

• Introduction to Linguistics; Discourse Analysis; Language in South Africa; Phonetics and Phonology; Pragmatics; Workshops on using PRAAT and ELAN for sociolinguistic and sociophonetic analyses

Publications

See here for conference and workshop presentations.

Book Chapter in preparation/under contract. ‘The embodiment of place: boorlinge, inkommers and the struggle to belong’. In: Multilingualism and (Im)mobilities: Language, Power, Agency, edited by Kristine Horner and Jennifer Dailey-O’Cain. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.

Journal Article. 2017. ‘Locality, belonging and the social meanings of Afrikaans rhotic variation in the South Cape: from patterns of frequency towards moments of meaning’. Multilingual Margins, 4(1):7-26.