Devyani Sharma
Biographic Data
| ID | 3592041 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Devyani Sharma |
| GIVEN NAMES | Devyani |
| FAMILY NAME | Sharma |
| SIGNATURE | SHARMA D |
| AFFILIATIONS | Queen Mary University of London |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2210-5888 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 183 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
L1 transfer and input demand in contact-driven syntactic change
The Style Game
Theories of speech accommodation and audience design have tended to focus on social identity functions of convergence and divergence in interaction. In this article, I focus on additional interactional phenomena that are under-studied but systematic. I present real-time data to illustrate variable control of speech features in style-shifting. These cues give listeners a sense of the default style of a speaker and their range of divergence from it…
Nuclear and Radiological Material Smuggling in the Indian Ocean
Incidents of nuclear and radiological smuggling in the Indian Ocean are a matter of concern. Attempts to smuggle nuclear material within India have also been reported as recently as 2021. Indian security agencies previously have also seized natural uranium in coastal states such as Gujarat, Maharashtra and Bengal indicating how vulnerable the Indian coast is to radiological and nuclear smuggling. The Nuclear Security Index has also consistently r…
Testing sociolinguistic theory and methods in world Englishes
This article assesses mainstream sociolinguistic theory and methods in the context of world Englishes. Despite its obvious applicability, sociolinguistic theory has not always been the primary analytic model for world Englishes. The multilingual and sometimes mobile circumstances of world Englishes contexts do not always fit the usual definition of a Labovian speech community. This article extends classic sociolinguistic theory and method to stud…
Years of British accent bias
Do accent biases observed half a century ago ( Giles 1970 ) and 15 years ago ( Coupland and Bishop 2007 ) still hold in Britain today? We provide an updated picture of national attitudes to accent labels by replicating and extending previous studies. Mean ratings and relative rankings of 38 accents for prestige and pleasantness by a large representative sample of the British population ( N = 821) attest to a remarkably stable, long-standing hiera…
Verbal interaction in a social dilemma
This study presents the first sociolinguistic examination of communication in a social dilemma. 90 participants (18 groups of 5) completed a modified public goods game with 2 rounds: an effort-based task and an unscripted online chat about the results. A linear regression shows that consensus-building language in the Round 1 chat affects cooperative behaviour in the Round 2 task. A qualitative analysis of 3 groups explores how participants use di…
Dynamic sociolinguistic processing
Social category information plays a central role in speech perception and processing. To date, research on this topic has struggled to model how social category perceptions evolve over the time course of an interaction. In this article, we build on recent methodological developments to investigate trajectories of listener perceptions, focusing on how impressions change as linguistic, social, and contextual details emerge. We base our arguments on…
Accent Bias and Perceptions of Professional Competence in England
Unequal outcomes in professional hiring for individuals from less privileged backgrounds have been widely reported in England. Although accent is one of the most salient signals of such a background, its role in unequal professional outcomes remains underexamined. This paper reports on a large-scale study of contemporary attitudes to accents in England. A large representative sample ( N = 848) of the population in England judged the interview per…
Social class across borders
Studies of generational dialect change in diaspora communities have tended to find that local forces outweigh transnational ones: parent varieties are rejected as too saliently foreign, and transnational effects fade in later generations. Examining the speech of second-generation British Asians, I document this initial shift away from the low status of Indian English, but also unexpected long-distance adoption of Indian English more recently, in …
Language Variation and Social Networks
The close relationship between language variation and the nature of social ties among people has been the focus of long-standing commentary in linguistics. A central puzzle in this relationship is the seeming contradiction between two bodies of evidence: automatic, mechanistic diffusion of linguistic forms through social networks and ideologically mediated choice in uptake of forms. Nearly a century of research has revealed that certain types of …
Methods for the study of accent bias and access to elite professions
Fair access to employment is vital for improving social mobility in Britain today. As language is not explicitly protected by the Equality Act 2010, accent can become a proxy for other forms of discrimination at key junctures for social mobility such as recruiting to elite professions. The Accent Bias and Fair Access in Britain project (www.accentbiasbritain.org) aims to assess prevailing attitudes to accents in Britain and to assess the extent t…
Style dominance
Social constructivist approaches to style have moved away from the cognitive asymmetry that underpinned Labov's original attention-to-speech model, namely that a first-learned vernacular often has cognitive primacy. This study explores the interplay of cognitive and interactional effects in style variation. It reports on three related dynamics of style variation in one individual-Fareed Zakaria, an Indian-American media personality. First, we see…
Scalar effects of social networks on language variation
The role of social networks in language variation has been studied using a wide range of metrics. This study critically examines the effect of different dimensions of networks on different aspects of language variation. Three dimensions of personal network (ethnicity, nationality, diversity) are evaluated in relation to three levels of language structure (phonetic form, accent range, language choice) over three generations of British Asians. The …
How to get published in the Journal of Sociolinguistics
Series Introduction
Labov in sociolinguistics
This theme issue marks fifty years since the publication of William Labov's Social Stratification of English in New York City, the foundation study of variationist sociolinguistics. This Introduction offers the editors' rationale for the shape of the issue. We briefly survey the innovations and impact of the New York study, together with the subsequent development of the field by Labov and others. We then touch on several strands of Labov's contr…
Research Methods in Linguistics
A comprehensive guide to conducting research projects in linguistics, this book provides a complete training in state-of-the-art data collection, processing, and analysis techniques. The book follows the structure of a research project, guiding the reader through the steps involved in collecting and processing data, and providing a solid foundation for linguistic analysis. All major research methods are covered, each by a leading expert. Rather t…
World Englishes and Language Ideologies
This chapter analyzes language ideologies within the context of world Englishes, focusing mainly on language ideological debates that have shaped the field of the study of world Englishes. These debates highlight the importance of language ideological analysis for a proper understanding of the social stratification of English language variation; to answer, ultimately, the important sociolinguistic question: why does language vary in the ways that…
The Oxford Handbook of World Englishes
As the most documented language in human history, English holds a unique key to unlocking some of the mysteries of that uniquely human endowment: language. Yet the field of World Englishes has remained somewhat marginal in linguistic theory and vice versa. This collection calls for more direct and mutually constructive engagement with current linguistic theories, questions, and methodologies. It aims to achieve this through a design that combines…
Cognitive and social forces in dialect shift
This study examines the retention of a non-native dialect feature by British Asians in London. We examine the use of one Punjabi feature ( t -retroflexion) and one British feature ( t -glottaling) across three groups: first-generation non-native immigrants and two age groups of second-generation British Asians. Cognitively oriented models predict that non-native features will either be innately blocked (Chambers, 2002) or reallocated by native ge…
Style repertoire and social change in British Asian English
This study has two goals: empirically, it accounts for variation found in the use of ethnically-marked variants among British-born Asians; methodologically, it assesses the variationist approach against a repertoire approach. In Part I, analysis of one Punjabi-derived phonetic trait, examined in interview data only, suggests that younger women shift to exclusive use of the British prestige variant. Part II expands the analysis to four variables a…
Aave/creole copula absence
This study confirms the robustness of the finding in the literature on African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and creole English (especially in the Caribbean) that omission of copular and auxiliary be varies systematically according to predicate type. Verbal predicates are associated with the highest rates of copula absence and following NPs with the lowest rates; following adjectives or locatives show intermediate rates (see Rickford 1998:19…
Typological diversity in New Englishes
Recent research has aimed to integrate the investigation of vernacular universals in native English dialects with variation in postcolonial varieties of English and cross-linguistic typology (Chambers 2004; Kortmann 2004). This article assumes that any search for universals in bilingual varieties must include an assessment of the grammatical conditioning of features and a comparison with the relevant substrates. Comparing Indian English and Singa…
Dialect stabilization and speaker awareness in non-native varieties of English1
Research on indigenized non-native varieties of English has aimed to distinguish these varieties from individual second language learning in structural and social terms (B. Kachru 1983;Platt, Weber and Ho 1984;Cheshire 1991) ; however, quantitative evidence of this divergence remains scarce. Through an analysis of a range of Indian English speakers in a contact situation in the United States, this study distinguishes developing dialect features f…
The pluperfect in native and non-native English
One of the challenges in characterizing non-native varieties of English is accounting for variant uses of ostensibly standard English forms. The present corpus study examines both quantitative and qualitative aspects of pluperfect use in Indian English (IndE), British English (BrE), and American English (AmE). IndE is found to differ from native usage by associating had + V- ed with present perfect and preterite meanings. Licensing of pluperfect …
Style repertoire and social change in British Asian English
This study has two goals: empirically, it accounts for variation found in the use of ethnically-marked variants among British-born Asians; methodologically, it assesses the variationist approach against a repertoire approach. In Part I, analysis of one Punjabi-derived phonetic trait, examined in interview data only, suggests that younger women shift to exclusive use of the British prestige variant. Part II expands the analysis to four variables a…
Cognitive and social forces in dialect shift
This study examines the retention of a non-native dialect feature by British Asians in London. We examine the use of one Punjabi feature ( t -retroflexion) and one British feature ( t -glottaling) across three groups: first-generation non-native immigrants and two age groups of second-generation British Asians. Cognitively oriented models predict that non-native features will either be innately blocked (Chambers, 2002) or reallocated by native ge…
Style dominance
Social constructivist approaches to style have moved away from the cognitive asymmetry that underpinned Labov's original attention-to-speech model, namely that a first-learned vernacular often has cognitive primacy. This study explores the interplay of cognitive and interactional effects in style variation. It reports on three related dynamics of style variation in one individual-Fareed Zakaria, an Indian-American media personality. First, we see…
Dialect stabilization and speaker awareness in non-native varieties of English1
Research on indigenized non-native varieties of English has aimed to distinguish these varieties from individual second language learning in structural and social terms (B. Kachru 1983;Platt, Weber and Ho 1984;Cheshire 1991) ; however, quantitative evidence of this divergence remains scarce. Through an analysis of a range of Indian English speakers in a contact situation in the United States, this study distinguishes developing dialect features f…
Typological diversity in New Englishes
Recent research has aimed to integrate the investigation of vernacular universals in native English dialects with variation in postcolonial varieties of English and cross-linguistic typology (Chambers 2004; Kortmann 2004). This article assumes that any search for universals in bilingual varieties must include an assessment of the grammatical conditioning of features and a comparison with the relevant substrates. Comparing Indian English and Singa…
Scalar effects of social networks on language variation
The role of social networks in language variation has been studied using a wide range of metrics. This study critically examines the effect of different dimensions of networks on different aspects of language variation. Three dimensions of personal network (ethnicity, nationality, diversity) are evaluated in relation to three levels of language structure (phonetic form, accent range, language choice) over three generations of British Asians. The …
Labov in sociolinguistics
This theme issue marks fifty years since the publication of William Labov's Social Stratification of English in New York City, the foundation study of variationist sociolinguistics. This Introduction offers the editors' rationale for the shape of the issue. We briefly survey the innovations and impact of the New York study, together with the subsequent development of the field by Labov and others. We then touch on several strands of Labov's contr…
Language Variation and Social Networks
The close relationship between language variation and the nature of social ties among people has been the focus of long-standing commentary in linguistics. A central puzzle in this relationship is the seeming contradiction between two bodies of evidence: automatic, mechanistic diffusion of linguistic forms through social networks and ideologically mediated choice in uptake of forms. Nearly a century of research has revealed that certain types of …
Methods for the study of accent bias and access to elite professions
Fair access to employment is vital for improving social mobility in Britain today. As language is not explicitly protected by the Equality Act 2010, accent can become a proxy for other forms of discrimination at key junctures for social mobility such as recruiting to elite professions. The Accent Bias and Fair Access in Britain project (www.accentbiasbritain.org) aims to assess prevailing attitudes to accents in Britain and to assess the extent t…
The pluperfect in native and non-native English
One of the challenges in characterizing non-native varieties of English is accounting for variant uses of ostensibly standard English forms. The present corpus study examines both quantitative and qualitative aspects of pluperfect use in Indian English (IndE), British English (BrE), and American English (AmE). IndE is found to differ from native usage by associating had + V- ed with present perfect and preterite meanings. Licensing of pluperfect …
Years of British accent bias
Do accent biases observed half a century ago ( Giles 1970 ) and 15 years ago ( Coupland and Bishop 2007 ) still hold in Britain today? We provide an updated picture of national attitudes to accent labels by replicating and extending previous studies. Mean ratings and relative rankings of 38 accents for prestige and pleasantness by a large representative sample of the British population ( N = 821) attest to a remarkably stable, long-standing hiera…
Dynamic sociolinguistic processing
Social category information plays a central role in speech perception and processing. To date, research on this topic has struggled to model how social category perceptions evolve over the time course of an interaction. In this article, we build on recent methodological developments to investigate trajectories of listener perceptions, focusing on how impressions change as linguistic, social, and contextual details emerge. We base our arguments on…
Social class across borders
Studies of generational dialect change in diaspora communities have tended to find that local forces outweigh transnational ones: parent varieties are rejected as too saliently foreign, and transnational effects fade in later generations. Examining the speech of second-generation British Asians, I document this initial shift away from the low status of Indian English, but also unexpected long-distance adoption of Indian English more recently, in …
Series Introduction
The Style Game
Theories of speech accommodation and audience design have tended to focus on social identity functions of convergence and divergence in interaction. In this article, I focus on additional interactional phenomena that are under-studied but systematic. I present real-time data to illustrate variable control of speech features in style-shifting. These cues give listeners a sense of the default style of a speaker and their range of divergence from it…
The pluperfect in native and non-native English
One of the challenges in characterizing non-native varieties of English is accounting for variant uses of ostensibly standard English forms. The present corpus study examines both quantitative and qualitative aspects of pluperfect use in Indian English (IndE), British English (BrE), and American English (AmE). IndE is found to differ from native usage by associating had + V- ed with present perfect and preterite meanings. Licensing of pluperfect …
Dialect stabilization and speaker awareness in non-native varieties of English1
Research on indigenized non-native varieties of English has aimed to distinguish these varieties from individual second language learning in structural and social terms (B. Kachru 1983;Platt, Weber and Ho 1984;Cheshire 1991) ; however, quantitative evidence of this divergence remains scarce. Through an analysis of a range of Indian English speakers in a contact situation in the United States, this study distinguishes developing dialect features f…
Aave/creole copula absence
This study confirms the robustness of the finding in the literature on African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and creole English (especially in the Caribbean) that omission of copular and auxiliary be varies systematically according to predicate type. Verbal predicates are associated with the highest rates of copula absence and following NPs with the lowest rates; following adjectives or locatives show intermediate rates (see Rickford 1998:19…
Typological diversity in New Englishes
Recent research has aimed to integrate the investigation of vernacular universals in native English dialects with variation in postcolonial varieties of English and cross-linguistic typology (Chambers 2004; Kortmann 2004). This article assumes that any search for universals in bilingual varieties must include an assessment of the grammatical conditioning of features and a comparison with the relevant substrates. Comparing Indian English and Singa…
Cognitive and social forces in dialect shift
This study examines the retention of a non-native dialect feature by British Asians in London. We examine the use of one Punjabi feature ( t -retroflexion) and one British feature ( t -glottaling) across three groups: first-generation non-native immigrants and two age groups of second-generation British Asians. Cognitively oriented models predict that non-native features will either be innately blocked (Chambers, 2002) or reallocated by native ge…
Style repertoire and social change in British Asian English
This study has two goals: empirically, it accounts for variation found in the use of ethnically-marked variants among British-born Asians; methodologically, it assesses the variationist approach against a repertoire approach. In Part I, analysis of one Punjabi-derived phonetic trait, examined in interview data only, suggests that younger women shift to exclusive use of the British prestige variant. Part II expands the analysis to four variables a…
The Oxford Handbook of World Englishes
As the most documented language in human history, English holds a unique key to unlocking some of the mysteries of that uniquely human endowment: language. Yet the field of World Englishes has remained somewhat marginal in linguistic theory and vice versa. This collection calls for more direct and mutually constructive engagement with current linguistic theories, questions, and methodologies. It aims to achieve this through a design that combines…
Research Methods in Linguistics
A comprehensive guide to conducting research projects in linguistics, this book provides a complete training in state-of-the-art data collection, processing, and analysis techniques. The book follows the structure of a research project, guiding the reader through the steps involved in collecting and processing data, and providing a solid foundation for linguistic analysis. All major research methods are covered, each by a leading expert. Rather t…
World Englishes and Language Ideologies
This chapter analyzes language ideologies within the context of world Englishes, focusing mainly on language ideological debates that have shaped the field of the study of world Englishes. These debates highlight the importance of language ideological analysis for a proper understanding of the social stratification of English language variation; to answer, ultimately, the important sociolinguistic question: why does language vary in the ways that…
How to get published in the Journal of Sociolinguistics
Series Introduction
Labov in sociolinguistics
This theme issue marks fifty years since the publication of William Labov's Social Stratification of English in New York City, the foundation study of variationist sociolinguistics. This Introduction offers the editors' rationale for the shape of the issue. We briefly survey the innovations and impact of the New York study, together with the subsequent development of the field by Labov and others. We then touch on several strands of Labov's contr…
Scalar effects of social networks on language variation
The role of social networks in language variation has been studied using a wide range of metrics. This study critically examines the effect of different dimensions of networks on different aspects of language variation. Three dimensions of personal network (ethnicity, nationality, diversity) are evaluated in relation to three levels of language structure (phonetic form, accent range, language choice) over three generations of British Asians. The …
Style dominance
Social constructivist approaches to style have moved away from the cognitive asymmetry that underpinned Labov's original attention-to-speech model, namely that a first-learned vernacular often has cognitive primacy. This study explores the interplay of cognitive and interactional effects in style variation. It reports on three related dynamics of style variation in one individual-Fareed Zakaria, an Indian-American media personality. First, we see…
Language Variation and Social Networks
The close relationship between language variation and the nature of social ties among people has been the focus of long-standing commentary in linguistics. A central puzzle in this relationship is the seeming contradiction between two bodies of evidence: automatic, mechanistic diffusion of linguistic forms through social networks and ideologically mediated choice in uptake of forms. Nearly a century of research has revealed that certain types of …
Methods for the study of accent bias and access to elite professions
Fair access to employment is vital for improving social mobility in Britain today. As language is not explicitly protected by the Equality Act 2010, accent can become a proxy for other forms of discrimination at key junctures for social mobility such as recruiting to elite professions. The Accent Bias and Fair Access in Britain project (www.accentbiasbritain.org) aims to assess prevailing attitudes to accents in Britain and to assess the extent t…
Accent Bias and Perceptions of Professional Competence in England
Unequal outcomes in professional hiring for individuals from less privileged backgrounds have been widely reported in England. Although accent is one of the most salient signals of such a background, its role in unequal professional outcomes remains underexamined. This paper reports on a large-scale study of contemporary attitudes to accents in England. A large representative sample ( N = 848) of the population in England judged the interview per…
Social class across borders
Studies of generational dialect change in diaspora communities have tended to find that local forces outweigh transnational ones: parent varieties are rejected as too saliently foreign, and transnational effects fade in later generations. Examining the speech of second-generation British Asians, I document this initial shift away from the low status of Indian English, but also unexpected long-distance adoption of Indian English more recently, in …
Years of British accent bias
Do accent biases observed half a century ago ( Giles 1970 ) and 15 years ago ( Coupland and Bishop 2007 ) still hold in Britain today? We provide an updated picture of national attitudes to accent labels by replicating and extending previous studies. Mean ratings and relative rankings of 38 accents for prestige and pleasantness by a large representative sample of the British population ( N = 821) attest to a remarkably stable, long-standing hiera…
Verbal interaction in a social dilemma
This study presents the first sociolinguistic examination of communication in a social dilemma. 90 participants (18 groups of 5) completed a modified public goods game with 2 rounds: an effort-based task and an unscripted online chat about the results. A linear regression shows that consensus-building language in the Round 1 chat affects cooperative behaviour in the Round 2 task. A qualitative analysis of 3 groups explores how participants use di…
Dynamic sociolinguistic processing
Social category information plays a central role in speech perception and processing. To date, research on this topic has struggled to model how social category perceptions evolve over the time course of an interaction. In this article, we build on recent methodological developments to investigate trajectories of listener perceptions, focusing on how impressions change as linguistic, social, and contextual details emerge. We base our arguments on…
Nuclear and Radiological Material Smuggling in the Indian Ocean
Incidents of nuclear and radiological smuggling in the Indian Ocean are a matter of concern. Attempts to smuggle nuclear material within India have also been reported as recently as 2021. Indian security agencies previously have also seized natural uranium in coastal states such as Gujarat, Maharashtra and Bengal indicating how vulnerable the Indian coast is to radiological and nuclear smuggling. The Nuclear Security Index has also consistently r…
Testing sociolinguistic theory and methods in world Englishes
This article assesses mainstream sociolinguistic theory and methods in the context of world Englishes. Despite its obvious applicability, sociolinguistic theory has not always been the primary analytic model for world Englishes. The multilingual and sometimes mobile circumstances of world Englishes contexts do not always fit the usual definition of a Labovian speech community. This article extends classic sociolinguistic theory and method to stud…
L1 transfer and input demand in contact-driven syntactic change
The Style Game
Theories of speech accommodation and audience design have tended to focus on social identity functions of convergence and divergence in interaction. In this article, I focus on additional interactional phenomena that are under-studied but systematic. I present real-time data to illustrate variable control of speech features in style-shifting. These cues give listeners a sense of the default style of a speaker and their range of divergence from it…
Linguistic Variation and Morphology (21 works) · Linguistics (20 works) · Multilingual Education and Policy (15 works) · Sociology (15 works) · Psychology (13 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · Computer Science (10 works) · Phonetics and Phonology Research (9 works) · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies (7 works) · Philosophy (7 works)