Humanities Staff

Dr Jonathan Marshall
BA (Hons) (Cape Town), PhD (Reading), PGCHE (Edinburgh)

Position
Course Leader, English Language

Contact
Email: jmarshall@glos.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0)1242 714707

Jonathan's research interests are sociolinguistics, language variation and change, regional and social dialectology, dialect contact, and varieties of English. He has focussed on the social motivations for language change or maintenance. His research has concentrated upon the rural dialect of the north-east of Scotland known as the Doric. He has developed Life Mode Theory (Hojrup 1983b) in terms of looking at rural communities from a perspective of 'mental urbanisation', and what implications this and other identity factors have for dialect maintenance. He works within the Labovian framework of quantification, using e.g. statistical modelling to test for correlations between sociological factors and language change. He currently teaches modules on the history, structure, sociolinguistics, and dialectology of English. He also supervises independent studies and dissertations in these areas.

His publications include:

Language Change and Sociolinguistics: Rethinking Social Networks. London: Palgrave. (2004)

'The Changing Sociolinguistic status of the glottal stop in northeast Scottish English'. English World Wide 24:1. (2003)

'Testing Social Network Theory in a rural setting'. University of Reading Working Papers 4. (2000)

'An analysis of second-language acquisition in a farming community in South Africa'. University of Reading Working Papers in Linguistics 3. (1997).