About Me

I'm Lecturer in Sociolinguistics at the University of Edinburgh. I also have a personal life, but that's another matter.

I sometimes blog about topics relevant to my research in Linguistics, sometimes about chance linguistic observations, sometimes about where I see the insights of Linguistics are relevant to the world at large, and sometimes not about Linguistics at all!

In fact, I'm a bit of a data geek, so quite frequently I'll post about interesting data I've found.


Also, "Val Systems" is a joke about my native, Philadelphian dialect (I blog about that a lot too), where "vowel" sounds exactly like "val." Vowels are kind of my thing.

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