Catherine Travis
Project Leader, ANU
Catherine Travis' research addresses questions related to linguistic and social factors impacting on language variation and change, in particular in socially diverse communities. As well as the Sydney Speaks project, she also works on language contact in a long-standing Spanish-English bilingual community in northern New Mexico, USA (New Mexico Spanish-English Bilingual project). A book arising from this project, Bilingualism in the Community was published by CUP in 2018 (co-authored with Rena… » read more
Ksenia Gnevsheva
Project Affiliate, ANU
My research interests lie at the intersection of sociolinguistics and second language acquisition and have largely been shaped by my training in theoretical and applied linguistics. The two main strands of my research program focus on language variation and change as applied to bilingual speakers: sociophonetic variation in the speech of bilinguals and factors affecting variation in perception of foreign-accented speech. I finished my PhD at the University of Canterbury and worked in research… » read more
Simon Gonzalez
Project Affiliate, ANU
Simón was a post-doctoral fellow on the Sydney Speaks project from 2017-2019. He completed his PhD in Australian English Phonology at the University of Newcastle, Australia (2015), and then worked as a Research Assistant at Griffith University on an ARC-funded project on phonological variation and change in West Australian English (led by Gerry Docherty, 2014-2016). Simón’s research focuses on acoustic phonetics, empowered by computational tools, and he has particular expertise in developing… » read more
James Grama
Project Affiliate, ANU
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… » read more
Barbara Horvath
Project Advisor, University of Sydney
Barbara's research interests have centred on empirical and quantitative studies of English speech communities, particularly those that include ethnic varieties of English resulting from in-migration or which were originally bilingual speech communities. Before joining the University of Sydney Linguistics Department in the mid-70s, she studied Mexican children in Los Angeles and African-American, Anglo and Mexican children in Lansing, Michigan. The Sydney speech community provided the… » read more
Cale Johnstone
Project Manager, ANU
Cale Johnstone is Project Manager for the Sydney Speaks project. She holds a BA in Latin American Studies from the Australian National University (2016). After working full time on Sydney Speaks throughout 2017, Cale moved to Mexico where she continues to contribute to the corpus development of the project by distance. Currently she is a knowledge management consultant in the humanitarian sector as well as a research officer with the Language Data Commons of Australia Project. Recent… » read more
Benjamin Purser
Research Associate, ANU
Benjamin graduated from the Australian National University in 2014 with a PhB in Linguistics, receiving First Class Honours and the University Medal. He was Lead RA on Sydney Speaks from 2014-2019 (with one year off in that time, while working in Tokyo, Japan). As Lead RA, Benjamin has worked in many capacities across both the 1970s and contemporary corpora, and has helped develop research methodologies. He has conducted investigations into methodologies for determining social class in these… » read more