Christian Ilbury
Biographic Data
| ID | 734472 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Christian Ilbury |
| GIVEN NAMES | Christian |
| FAMILY NAME | Ilbury |
| SIGNATURE | ILBURY C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Edinburgh |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9289-271X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 54 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 14 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2020 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Tackling linguistic discrimination in higher education: A student-staff collaborative approach
The field has long been committed to critically exploring the role of language in systemic inequality and social injustice. More recently, a growing body of research has explored these issues not just as ‘real-world’ problems but also as issues in Higher Education (HE). This article adds to this work by introducing a staff–student collaborative model which is designed to tackle linguistic discrimination in HE. The approach, which we have implemen…
“Fight Like a Girl”: The Discursive Construction of Transphobia in the British and French Press Through the Representation of Imane Khelif
This paper examines the discursive representation of Imane Khelif—a female boxer subjected to transphobic discourse based on her perceived masculinity—across British and French news media. Taking a queer theoretical approach informed by the methodological principles of Corpus-Assisted Critical Discourse Analysis, we focus on stories that relate to Khelif's contentious participation in the 2024 Paris Olympic Games and its subsequent fallout. We fi…
Pronominal variation in interaction: The interactional function of man and bro
Recent work in variationist sociolinguistics has argued for greater interactional accountability in analyses of linguistic variation. The present article contributes to this line of inquiry by exploring the interactional conditioning of a relatively new pronoun – man – in two datasets: (i) a corpus of speech and social media data from young people in East London recorded in 2016/17 and (ii) a more recent social media corpus of fifty English-langu…
Pov: You’re gay in PE – discourses of ‘gay trauma’ in social media narratives of physical education (PE) lessons
Physical education (PE) lessons can be heteronormative and exclusionary spaces for LGBTQIA + students, with their experiences often marked by homophobia and discrimination. This paper adopts an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on perspectives from sociolinguistics and the sociology of education, to explore how queer users articulate their experiences of PE through the social media platform TikTok. Using digital ethnography, and drawing on a co…
Gen Z Language? Y'all Mean Aave’: The Appropriation of African American Vernacular English as ‘TikTok Language’
Sociolinguistic research has long documented the appropriation of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) across media including film, music and advertising. In this article, we add to this body of work by exploring the digital recontextualisation of a subset of AAVE features as ‘TikTok/internet language’. To do this, we analyse metalinguistic discourses of linguistic appropriation in a corpus of 178 TikTok videos. We identify two main competi…
HRT in DMC? the orthographic representation of high rising terminals in WhatsApp
Contemporary research has shown that a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods is productive in exploring patterns of Digitally Mediated Communication (DMC). In this paper, I demonstrate the analytical potential of this approach by studying the typographic representation of a prosodic feature of spoken language – High Rising Terminals (HRTs, e.g., that beer pong place I went for my birthday?) – in a large corpus of WhatsApp messages (…
Navigating ‘safe’ and ‘non-safe’ queer spaces: A study of style-shifting in Singapore
It is well documented that gay people adopt behavioural strategies to navigate the heteronormative expectations and norms of social space. These practices are likely to be particularly pronounced in socially conservative countries which have seen less progress for LGBTQ+ rights. This study examines how two gay men (Rui and Kenni) stylistically negotiate their sexual identities in a socially conservative country – Singapore – by analyzing the vari…
Using social media to infer the diffusion of an urban contact dialect: A case study of Multicultural London English
Sociolinguistic research has demonstrated that 'urban contact dialects' tend to diffuse beyond the speech communities in which they first emerge. However, no research has attempted to explore the distribution of these varieties across an entire nation nor isolate the social mechanisms that propel their spread. In this paper, we use a corpus of 1.8 billion geo-tagged tweets to explore the spread of Multicultural London English (MLE) lexis across t…
The recontextualisation of Multicultural London English: Stylising the 'roadman
Though research on the multiethnolect spoken in London-Multicultural London English (MLE)-has described the social distribution of the variety, the stylistic potentials of MLE remain poorly understood. This article explores the enregisterment and subsequent 'recontextualisation' (Bauman & Briggs 1990) of MLE by analysing the linguistic and aesthetic components of a stylistic identity-the 'roadman'. Specifically, I explore a corpus of TikTok video…
Discourses of social media amongst youth: An ethnographic perspective
Recent large-scale surveys of social media have repeatedly shown that Facebook and Twitter are losing popularity amongst teenagers, with newer ‘image-first’ apps such as Snapchat and Instagram becoming preferred amongst this demographic. Whilst there is a wealth of research which has examined more general reasons for this shift, it is unclear to what extent these explanations can account for more local level user practices. This article interroga…
U Ok Hun: The digital commodification of white woman style
Sociolinguistic research has increasingly explored the ways in which semiotic features are variably recruited to stylistically perform enregistered social personae. In this paper, I add to this body of work by exploring the emergence of a stereotypically feminine style and persona that is widespread in British social media. Specifically, I examine the prevalence of non-standard spellings (e.g., darling, gorgeous), discourse features (e.g., hun, b…
A tale of two cities: The discursive construction of 'place' in gentrifying East London
In recent years, the East End of London has been dramatically transformed from a poor, working-class area, to one of the most fashionable neighbourhoods in the world. Adding to a growing body of research which examines the sociolinguistic dynamics of gentrifying neighbourhoods, this article draws on data from two ethnographic projects to examine how young people from the gentrified (i.e. working-class) and gentrifier (i.e. middle-class) communiti…
‘Ey, wait, wait, gully!’ Style, stance and the social meaning of attention signals in East London adolescent speech
Recent accounts of discourse-pragmatic (DP) variation have demonstrated that these features can acquire social indexical meaning. However, in comparison to other linguistic variables, DP features remain underexplored and third-wave perspectives on the topic are limited. In this article, I analyse the distribution, function and social meaning of the ‘attention signals’ – those features which fulfil the explicit function of eliciting the attention …
Sassy Queens: Stylistic orthographic variation in Twitter and the enregisterment of Aave
Recent computational sociolinguistic analyses of social media have emphasized the potential of using orthographic variation as a proxy for speech, thereby permitting macro‐level quantitative studies of regional and social variation (e.g. Eisenstein, 2015). However, the extent to which stylistic variation may affect these analyses remains largely unexplored. In this paper, I explore how authors use variant spellings stylistically to deploy persona…
Sassy Queens: Stylistic orthographic variation in Twitter and the enregisterment of Aave
Recent computational sociolinguistic analyses of social media have emphasized the potential of using orthographic variation as a proxy for speech, thereby permitting macro‐level quantitative studies of regional and social variation (e.g. Eisenstein, 2015). However, the extent to which stylistic variation may affect these analyses remains largely unexplored. In this paper, I explore how authors use variant spellings stylistically to deploy persona…
U Ok Hun: The digital commodification of white woman style
Sociolinguistic research has increasingly explored the ways in which semiotic features are variably recruited to stylistically perform enregistered social personae. In this paper, I add to this body of work by exploring the emergence of a stereotypically feminine style and persona that is widespread in British social media. Specifically, I examine the prevalence of non-standard spellings (e.g., darling, gorgeous), discourse features (e.g., hun, b…
The recontextualisation of Multicultural London English: Stylising the 'roadman
Though research on the multiethnolect spoken in London-Multicultural London English (MLE)-has described the social distribution of the variety, the stylistic potentials of MLE remain poorly understood. This article explores the enregisterment and subsequent 'recontextualisation' (Bauman & Briggs 1990) of MLE by analysing the linguistic and aesthetic components of a stylistic identity-the 'roadman'. Specifically, I explore a corpus of TikTok video…
A tale of two cities: The discursive construction of 'place' in gentrifying East London
In recent years, the East End of London has been dramatically transformed from a poor, working-class area, to one of the most fashionable neighbourhoods in the world. Adding to a growing body of research which examines the sociolinguistic dynamics of gentrifying neighbourhoods, this article draws on data from two ethnographic projects to examine how young people from the gentrified (i.e. working-class) and gentrifier (i.e. middle-class) communiti…
HRT in DMC? the orthographic representation of high rising terminals in WhatsApp
Contemporary research has shown that a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods is productive in exploring patterns of Digitally Mediated Communication (DMC). In this paper, I demonstrate the analytical potential of this approach by studying the typographic representation of a prosodic feature of spoken language – High Rising Terminals (HRTs, e.g., that beer pong place I went for my birthday?) – in a large corpus of WhatsApp messages (…
Discourses of social media amongst youth: An ethnographic perspective
Recent large-scale surveys of social media have repeatedly shown that Facebook and Twitter are losing popularity amongst teenagers, with newer ‘image-first’ apps such as Snapchat and Instagram becoming preferred amongst this demographic. Whilst there is a wealth of research which has examined more general reasons for this shift, it is unclear to what extent these explanations can account for more local level user practices. This article interroga…
Using social media to infer the diffusion of an urban contact dialect: A case study of Multicultural London English
Sociolinguistic research has demonstrated that 'urban contact dialects' tend to diffuse beyond the speech communities in which they first emerge. However, no research has attempted to explore the distribution of these varieties across an entire nation nor isolate the social mechanisms that propel their spread. In this paper, we use a corpus of 1.8 billion geo-tagged tweets to explore the spread of Multicultural London English (MLE) lexis across t…
Sassy Queens: Stylistic orthographic variation in Twitter and the enregisterment of Aave
Recent computational sociolinguistic analyses of social media have emphasized the potential of using orthographic variation as a proxy for speech, thereby permitting macro‐level quantitative studies of regional and social variation (e.g. Eisenstein, 2015). However, the extent to which stylistic variation may affect these analyses remains largely unexplored. In this paper, I explore how authors use variant spellings stylistically to deploy persona…
‘Ey, wait, wait, gully!’ Style, stance and the social meaning of attention signals in East London adolescent speech
Recent accounts of discourse-pragmatic (DP) variation have demonstrated that these features can acquire social indexical meaning. However, in comparison to other linguistic variables, DP features remain underexplored and third-wave perspectives on the topic are limited. In this article, I analyse the distribution, function and social meaning of the ‘attention signals’ – those features which fulfil the explicit function of eliciting the attention …
Discourses of social media amongst youth: An ethnographic perspective
Recent large-scale surveys of social media have repeatedly shown that Facebook and Twitter are losing popularity amongst teenagers, with newer ‘image-first’ apps such as Snapchat and Instagram becoming preferred amongst this demographic. Whilst there is a wealth of research which has examined more general reasons for this shift, it is unclear to what extent these explanations can account for more local level user practices. This article interroga…
U Ok Hun: The digital commodification of white woman style
Sociolinguistic research has increasingly explored the ways in which semiotic features are variably recruited to stylistically perform enregistered social personae. In this paper, I add to this body of work by exploring the emergence of a stereotypically feminine style and persona that is widespread in British social media. Specifically, I examine the prevalence of non-standard spellings (e.g., darling, gorgeous), discourse features (e.g., hun, b…
A tale of two cities: The discursive construction of 'place' in gentrifying East London
In recent years, the East End of London has been dramatically transformed from a poor, working-class area, to one of the most fashionable neighbourhoods in the world. Adding to a growing body of research which examines the sociolinguistic dynamics of gentrifying neighbourhoods, this article draws on data from two ethnographic projects to examine how young people from the gentrified (i.e. working-class) and gentrifier (i.e. middle-class) communiti…
HRT in DMC? the orthographic representation of high rising terminals in WhatsApp
Contemporary research has shown that a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods is productive in exploring patterns of Digitally Mediated Communication (DMC). In this paper, I demonstrate the analytical potential of this approach by studying the typographic representation of a prosodic feature of spoken language – High Rising Terminals (HRTs, e.g., that beer pong place I went for my birthday?) – in a large corpus of WhatsApp messages (…
Navigating ‘safe’ and ‘non-safe’ queer spaces: A study of style-shifting in Singapore
It is well documented that gay people adopt behavioural strategies to navigate the heteronormative expectations and norms of social space. These practices are likely to be particularly pronounced in socially conservative countries which have seen less progress for LGBTQ+ rights. This study examines how two gay men (Rui and Kenni) stylistically negotiate their sexual identities in a socially conservative country – Singapore – by analyzing the vari…
Using social media to infer the diffusion of an urban contact dialect: A case study of Multicultural London English
Sociolinguistic research has demonstrated that 'urban contact dialects' tend to diffuse beyond the speech communities in which they first emerge. However, no research has attempted to explore the distribution of these varieties across an entire nation nor isolate the social mechanisms that propel their spread. In this paper, we use a corpus of 1.8 billion geo-tagged tweets to explore the spread of Multicultural London English (MLE) lexis across t…
The recontextualisation of Multicultural London English: Stylising the 'roadman
Though research on the multiethnolect spoken in London-Multicultural London English (MLE)-has described the social distribution of the variety, the stylistic potentials of MLE remain poorly understood. This article explores the enregisterment and subsequent 'recontextualisation' (Bauman & Briggs 1990) of MLE by analysing the linguistic and aesthetic components of a stylistic identity-the 'roadman'. Specifically, I explore a corpus of TikTok video…
Tackling linguistic discrimination in higher education: A student-staff collaborative approach
The field has long been committed to critically exploring the role of language in systemic inequality and social injustice. More recently, a growing body of research has explored these issues not just as ‘real-world’ problems but also as issues in Higher Education (HE). This article adds to this work by introducing a staff–student collaborative model which is designed to tackle linguistic discrimination in HE. The approach, which we have implemen…
“Fight Like a Girl”: The Discursive Construction of Transphobia in the British and French Press Through the Representation of Imane Khelif
This paper examines the discursive representation of Imane Khelif—a female boxer subjected to transphobic discourse based on her perceived masculinity—across British and French news media. Taking a queer theoretical approach informed by the methodological principles of Corpus-Assisted Critical Discourse Analysis, we focus on stories that relate to Khelif's contentious participation in the 2024 Paris Olympic Games and its subsequent fallout. We fi…
Pronominal variation in interaction: The interactional function of man and bro
Recent work in variationist sociolinguistics has argued for greater interactional accountability in analyses of linguistic variation. The present article contributes to this line of inquiry by exploring the interactional conditioning of a relatively new pronoun – man – in two datasets: (i) a corpus of speech and social media data from young people in East London recorded in 2016/17 and (ii) a more recent social media corpus of fifty English-langu…
Pov: You’re gay in PE – discourses of ‘gay trauma’ in social media narratives of physical education (PE) lessons
Physical education (PE) lessons can be heteronormative and exclusionary spaces for LGBTQIA + students, with their experiences often marked by homophobia and discrimination. This paper adopts an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on perspectives from sociolinguistics and the sociology of education, to explore how queer users articulate their experiences of PE through the social media platform TikTok. Using digital ethnography, and drawing on a co…
Gen Z Language? Y'all Mean Aave’: The Appropriation of African American Vernacular English as ‘TikTok Language’
Sociolinguistic research has long documented the appropriation of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) across media including film, music and advertising. In this article, we add to this body of work by exploring the digital recontextualisation of a subset of AAVE features as ‘TikTok/internet language’. To do this, we analyse metalinguistic discourses of linguistic appropriation in a corpus of 178 TikTok videos. We identify two main competi…
Linguistic Variation and Morphology (9 works) · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies (8 works) · Sociology (8 works) · Multilingual Education and Policy (7 works) · Gender Studies (6 works) · Linguistics (6 works) · Political science (5 works) · Anthropology (4 works) · Art (4 works) · Ethnography (4 works)