It's taken a little while, a lot of luck, and a whole heap of generosity, but it's time to revamp this website for what it now represents - a funded PhD project! My investigation of the accent of Stoke-on-Trent has gone from something I pursued in my gap year* and talked about relentlessly to anybody who would listen, to the project to which I'm lucky enough to be dedicating my life for the next three years (...and talking about relentlessly to anybody who will listen).
There's just one problem that comes from starting a project like this; one skill it's vital to develop: The Spiel. The early weeks of the PhD are littered with get-to-know-you events and meeting fellow students and staff, which - of course - is wonderful. (I have to say, Sheffield is the friendliest University and city I've ever encountered.) However, all this meeting and greeting demands a short, interesting and clear answer to the question "So, what's your research about?".
Not as easy as you might think.
Not only do you have to cram everything you're interested in and working on into a few sentences, using language that isn't alienating or confusing, at this precise moment, I don't know what my own research is! I have plans, I have ideas, and I think I know what I want to achieve, but I also need guidance, reining in, experience. So making a snappy spiel is a real challenge.
That said, I'm lucky, because Linguistics (and Sociolinguistics in particular) is a pretty accessible discipline - other, more complicated/specialist/abstract disciplines have it much harder. One of my favourite things about studying accents is that everybody has one, and an opinion about it, and other people's. Despite the academia involved, a Sociolinguistics spiel is a comparatively simpler one to master.
And so, The Spiel. Edited, scribbled out and memorised by heart (though probably changed a million times):
"I work in Sociolinguistics, which looks at how language interacts with social factors, and is used by people to construct and manage their identity. I'm focussing on the accent of Stoke-on-Trent, my hometown, which for many years had a strong pottery and mining industry which has recently declined. The project firstly documents the features of the accent, which hasn't really been done before, as well as investigates the relationship between accent, identity and changing social history in the region."So there it is. My PhD summarised in a few lines. The Spiel.
Probably.
For the moment, anyway.
Anybody I meet in the coming months, look forward to hearing a (possibly garbled) version of the above!
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*Not that kind of gap year - details of what I got up to last year can be found here!
