100 Years of Continuity and Change in Spoken British English

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This collaborative doctoral project will compile a diachronic corpus of sound recordings from the historicholdings of the British Library Sound Archive, an unparalleled collection of natural British speechspanning over a century. The corpus design will aim for a balanced selection across region, register anddemographic factors while maximising time depth. Using this unique corpus, the project will investigate afundamental theoretical challenge in the study of language change: What is the relative importance oflinguistic factors, frequency and social factors in changes observed in British English over time?This question has been difficult to address fully so far due to the lack of audio archives with sufficient timedepth. Recent historical corpora have begun to remedy this, leading to some unexpected findingsregarding the role of frequency in phonetic change (Hay et al. 2015) and intensifying the debate over therelative role of frequency in large-scale dialect change (Labov 2010; Kiparsky 2016). A substantialdiachronic corpus will also permit deeper investigation of related themes such as vernacular stability,social factors in change (age, demographics, gender, class) and co-variation in change.