Using diachronic spoken corpora to study sound change in English: the DIACSEN corpus and examples

The talk discusses the use of diachronic spoken corpora in study of sound change in English varieties over time. It also describes the sampling criteria used in building one spoken corpus of Standard Southern British English (SSBE): the DIACSEN (Diachronic Corpus of Spoken English) corpus. It then exemplifies the use of materials from this corpus to study two sound changes in SSBE, one complete (GOOSE-fronting) and another in progress (/r/-sandhi). The first study analyzes the trajectory of the GOOSE vowel in a sample of SSBE speakers over ten decades (1920s-2010s). The second study focuses on the use of /r/-sandhi in the speech of Queen Elizabeth II over seven decades (1950s-2010s) and a reference group of speakers over ten decades (1920s-2020s). Social and sociolinguistic underpinnings of these changes are also discussed.