James Grama, Ph.D

I'm a Research Fellow (Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter) in the Sociolinguistics Lab at the Department of Anglophone Studies at the University of Duisburg-Essen.

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As a sociophonetician, I'm interested in how social factors play a role in phonetic variation and change over time. My research deals with questions of language variation and change using a combination of empirical sociolinguistic, ethnographically-informed corpus-based, and computational methods. I am particularly interested in questions surrounding vowel shifts, and how speakers of various social backgrounds respond to, participate in, and drive changes forward. I also have general interests in dialectology, and variation in creoles and under-documented languages.

 

My BA is from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where I worked with Robert Kennedy. My MA and PhD are from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, where I worked with Katie Drager. Before coming to UDE, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow on the Sydney Speaks project at the Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language at the Australian National University, a project led by Catherine Travis, and before that, I was an Instructor at Santa Monica College.