Department of Language and Linguistic Science
Grattis Julia!
Posted on 7 December 2018
Julia Forsberg, who completed our MSc in Forensic Speech Science in 2009, has successfully defended her PhD at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. The thesis, entitled 'Audience design in interaction: Studies on adolescent urban spoken languages' took the form of a compilation dissertation, i.e. a collection of research articles rather than a single monograph. Julia (second from right) was supervised by Åsa Abelin (far left), with co-supervision by Sally Boyd (second from left) and Dom Watt (far right), and is the second linguistics PhD student at Gothenburg to have been received doctoral supervision from a member of York's Department of Language and Linguistic Science (the first was Jonas Lindh, who was co-supervised by Paul Foulkes). Julia ran a number of studies of the language used by high-school students in Sweden, with a focus on Swedish and English but acknowledging the highly multilingual nature of Swedish cities owing to the country's high immigration rate. She also worked with German colleagues on a comparative study of attitudes towards standard and non-standard Englishes among English teachers in Sweden and Germany. Julia's 'opponent' at the thesis defence was Ulrikke Rindal of the University of Oslo, who was herself co-supervised by Paul Foulkes during her time here in York. We wish Julia every success in her new position teaching linguistics at the Swedish Institute in Stockholm.