Investigating regional variation in British English using Big Data: new applications for forensics and criminal justice

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There has been much research dedicated to regional variation of British English with regards to both accent and dialect. Such research is primarily concerned with speakers' vowels and consonants and the use of lexical items and grammatical features. Similarly, we are beginning to see research into the variation of 'features above the segments', i.e. prosody (e.g. intonation or 'speech melody') (Nance et al. 2015), rhythm (Fuchs 2016), and voice quality (Szakay & Torgersen 2015)). The major weakness of these studies is that they are localised to one or very few places. We still know very little about contemporary large-scale variation at national level, and about how these individual studies mesh together into a nationwide picture of the dialect landscape of the country.