The inspiration for Lifespans & Styles came from student work on the honours course, Sociolinguistics, as taught most years by Dr. Lauren Hall-Lew at the University of Edinburgh since 2011. The course is research based, guiding students in designing and carrying out novel empirical research in variationist sociolinguistics. Students on the course work individually or in small groups, designing and executing the entire project themselves: choosing the speaker(s) and the linguistic variable(s) for analysis and collecting all the data and running statistical analyses. Key words: Dialects, Sociolinguistics, Gender Differences, Generational Differences, Phonetics. |