The Department of English Language & Linguistics is delighted to announce that Jonathan Kasstan has been awarded a PhD, under the supervision of Dr David Hornsby and Dr Damien Hall (Newcastle University), with a thesis entitled ‘Variation and Change in Francoprovençal: A Study of an Emerging Linguistic Norm’.
His thesis explored language change among French and Swiss speakers of Francoprovençal – a severely endangered regional language that has been the subject of very little empirical investigation. Using a corpus of over 50 hours of speech samples collected from 58 research participants in 2012, the study found that, broadly, traditional linguistic variants used by native speakers are disappearing in both countries. This finding is broadly consistent with the literature on other regional minority languages spoken in the same regions. However, the study was also concerned with so-called ‘new speakers’ of Francoprovençal, who acquire the language in an educational context, rather than via the home. The evidence suggests that a pan-regional linguistic norm is emerging among these new speakers, who employ variants that are not only different from traditional norms, but also appear to convey social work. New speakers therefore reveal themselves to be potential agents of linguistic change, as well as important arbiters in the maintenance of a threatened language.
Findings from the study are to appear in a forthcoming special issue of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language, edited by Jonathan Kasstan and Naomi Nagy (University of Toronto).
Our congratulations to Dr Kasstan.
For more details of the PhD in Linguistics, please see: www.kent.ac.uk/secl/ell/postgraduate/research-linguistics.html