PhD placement students, Andrew Booth & Rowan Campbell, write: What happens when lots of languages and dialects come into contact with each other? This week, Andrew and Rowan discuss contact effects in super-diverse cities like London, and what happens … read more
PhD placement student, Rowan Campbell, writes: If you’ve been listening to our podcast (Shameless Plug #378902), you just might have noticed that I, the Scottish one, love glottal stops. This is the sound that’s often written as an apostrophe where you would usually see a /t/ – for example, wa’er… read more
This week’s selection comes from Richard Ranft, Head of Sound and Vision. Even among wildlife sound recordists accustomed to capturing unusual sounds, it is a surprise to hear the sound of a rat, and one which literally sings, with a change in pitch and rhythm. Amazon bamboo rats are a… read more
This week’s selection comes from Holly Gilbert, Cataloguer of Digital Multimedia Collections. Mother and son, Radhika and Omar, talk about Omar’s experience of attending a drama course at LAMDA – The London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. Omar describes the assumptions that he feels people at LAMDA have made… read more
PhD placement students, Andrew Booth & Rowan Campbell, write: Is the UK in danger of losing its wide variety of local accents? In the third episode of Linguistics at the Library, Andrew and Rowan investigate why we might tone down our accent when talking to people from different areas, and… read more