James was a post-doctoral fellow on the Sydney Speaks project from 2017-2019, following which he became a Research Fellow in the Sociolinguistics Lab at the Department of Anglophone Studies at the University of Duisburg-Essen. He completed his PhD at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa (2015) where he focused largely on vocalic variation in English and English-based varieties. His work on California English, Hawaiʻi English, and Hawaiʻi Creole has investigated the ways in which phonetic variation is correlated with social factors and sound change over time. In his research, he uses quantitative acoustic measures along with rigorous statistical models to describe how changes in linguistic varieties have taken shape, especially in heterogeneous communities.

Recent Publications

Grama, James. 2022. "Managing Legacy Data in a Sociophonetic Study of Vowel Variation and Change". In The Open Handbook in Linguistic Data, MIT Press.

James Grama, Catherine Travis, and Simon Gonzalez. 2021. "Ethnic variation in real time: Change in Australian English diphthongs". In Studies in Language Variation (Papers from the Tenth International Conference on Language Variation in Europe (ICLaVE 10), 292-314. Amsterdam.

Benjamin Purser, James Grama, and Catherine Travis. 2020. "Australian English over time: Using sociolinguistic analysis to inform dialect coaching." Voice and Speech Review. 14 (3): 269-291. doi: 10.1080/23268263.2020.1750791.

Simon Gonzalez, James Grama, and Catherine Travis. 2020. "Comparing the performance of forced aligners used in sociophonetic research." Linguistics Vanguard. 6 (1) doi: 10.1515/lingvan-2019-0058.

Danielle Barth, James Grama, Simon Gonzalez, and Catherine Travis. 2020. "Using forced alignment for sociophonetic research on a minority language." University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics. 25 (2): 1-10.