The aim of my research is to explore the nature of stylistic variation in Welsh. Sociolinguistic work on Welsh has been sparse since the eighties, meaning that our understanding of style in modern Welsh may be outdated. My study will attempt to elicit stylistic variation by recording speakers in different situations (informal conversation and interviews) and with different interlocutors (peers and authority figures). A corpus linguistic analysis will then attempt to establish what variables Bilingual Welsh speakers vary to reflect changes in social distance and formality. The thesis of my study is that speakers will vary their use of code-switching and mutation between less formal and more informal conditions. It is further predicted that some other variables suggested by traditional grammar books, such as periphrastic vs. synthetic clause constructions, will not vary significantly.

Selected Recent Publications

Prys, M. Deuchar, M. and Gwerfyl, R. (2012) Measuring speech accommodation in rural welsh pharmacies. In Hamburg Studies in Multilingualism 13: Multilingual Individuals in Multilingual Societies, Braunmüller and Gabriel (eds). Amsterdam, John Benjamins.