“Language and social change over the lifespan: Speakers of Australian English forty years on”

Elena is completing her PhD with the Sydney Speaks project, conducting a lifespan study, examining the speech of a group of 10 Greek- and Italian-Australians who were recorded as teenagers (in the 1970s) and again as adults (in the 2010s). The project uses quantitative methods to investigate the role of the individual in community language change, focusing on the predictability of change over the lifespan for phonetic and phonological variables. She completed a Bachelor of Arts with Honours in Linguistics in 2017 at the University of Sydney, with a thesis examining linguistic variation and language ideologies in young adults from Western and Northern Sydney.