About
Language variation and change is an integrated subfield of linguistics that includes dialectology (the study of regional variation in language), historical linguistics (the study of how languages change over time) and sociolinguistics (the study of social variation in language).聽 This grouping reflects the view that all three phenomena are related through the central concept of variation: change occurs via regional and social聽variation and much variation therefore reflects on-going change.
At McGill, research and teaching on language variation and change involve strong connections with both theoretical and experimental linguistics, as well as a wide range of聽other allied fields, such as聽computer science,聽the humanities,聽psychology and social science.聽 A particular strength is sociophonetics, looking at inter-group and intra-group variability at the phonetic level.聽 Past and current research also addresses Canadian English,聽computational models of language change, diachronic syntax,聽film and television language,聽lexical variation,聽loan word nativization,聽and聽sound change.
Faculty
Francisco Torreira
Psycholinguistics
Prosody
Corpus Linguistics
Interactional Linguistics
Quantitative Methods
