British National Corpus (BNC) as a sociolinguistic dataset: Exploring individual and social variation

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The project exploits an existing dataset, The British National Corpus (BNC), for the study of informal spoken British English as used by different age and social groups across the UK. In addition, new developments in British English will be investigated by comparing the BNC with BNC2014, a new dataset that is being developed at Lancaster University in collaboration with Cambridge University Press. This allows us, for the first time, to look at language change in spoken British English, on a large scale, over twenty years. By combing methodologies from the fields of corpus linguistics and sociolinguistics as well as using novel analytical methods for in-depth exploration of the data, the project will offer new insights into social variation in British English that have previously not been possible. The focus of the sociolinguistic analyses will be on age, an important aspect of everyday social life, that has so far received only limited attention from researchers studying language.The main contribution of the project is not only to our knowledge of British English but also to enabling future systematic research in this area. The results of the project will be applied in teaching of the English language at secondary schools (AS and A-level) and in ESL/EFL classes to students whose mother tongue is not English. Internationally, there is a growing demand for EFL/ESL teaching, which also represents an important part of British economy. The results of the project will also be disseminated via a free online course (our Corpus Linguistics MOOC) run by the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science, Lancaster University as well as via different channels of the project partners (project ambassadors). The project has been endorsed by Cambridge University Press, a leading global academic publisher and part of the University of Cambridge, the English and Media Centre, an important educational charity working with secondary teachers of English Language and Media Studies in the UK and abroad and Trinity College London, a major international testing board operating in over 40 countries worldwide.