Tweetin’ like you talk: Accent representation on social media

Posted on 25 November 2021

A resounding success for a talk in linguistics delivered to English Language A-level students

On Wednesday 17th November, Dr George Bailey (Department of Language and Linguistic Science) participated as an invited speaker in the emagazine A-Level English Language conference in London. Organised by the English and Media Centre, the event is designed for A-Level English Language students to gain insight into the type of cutting-edge research carried out in linguistics and to learn about new case studies they can use in their own work

Dr Bailey’s presentation was titled Tweetin’ like you talk: Accent representation on social media. The paper focused on how people use creative re-spellings on Twitter (such as citeh for city, den for then, and doon for down) to more closely reflect their own spoken accent and project a particular social and linguistic identity through their tweets. The case study is also part of the York English Language Toolkit, which includes various teaching materials for teachers of English Language A level.

The event was a resounding success with an attendance of over 600 students from colleges all over the country, showing a keen interest in the field of linguistics among A-Level English Language students.

“I was delighted to receive the invitation from the English and Media Centre to present my research at this conference. I think it’s brilliant that A-Level students get this opportunity to hear about the kind of research that can be conducted in linguistics and to see examples of real case studies that relate to the things they’re currently learning about, like accent diversity and language use online in the case of my talk. They were a really engaged crowd and I’m sure there were more than a few future sociolinguists in there!” - Dr George Bailey, Department of Language and Linguistic Science