Our Research
Welcome to our research page. Here you can find details of our various research projects, some of which we have carried out together, and others that have been conducted individually or in collaboration with other academic colleagues.
Westminster Voices: accent, authenticity and representation in UK politics.
This new shared project investigates the linguistic landscape of British politics. It explores how parliamentarians use language, voice and accent to navigate their professional lives. Watch this space!
Accent Evaluations in England
In this project we are exploring how different accents from across England are evaluated by other people from England. We will explore whether certain regional areas are more affected by accent bias and who holds these evaluations. We will also analyse how a person’s ethnicity, class and gender affects how they are evaluated. More to come!
Manchester Voices
A major project exploring thr accents, dialects and identities of Greater Manchester. Using a purpose-built “accent van”, the project celebrates the region’s linguistic diversity and the relationship between voice and place.
The Three Accents of the South East
Using machine learning and acoustic analysis, this research explored which accents are spoken by young people in South East England. We recorded the voices of 193 people between the ages of 18 and 33 from across south-east England and London. We then built a computer algorithm which “listened” to how they spoke and grouped them by how similarly they pronounced vowels in different words.
We identified three main accents: Standard Southern British English, Multicultural London English and Estuary English. Cockney, the working-class, London accent and received pronunciation, which some call Queen’s English (or perhaps now King’s English), did not appear in our analysis. This suggests that these accents are not spoken – or are not the predominant accents spoken – by young people in the South East.
Cockneys in Essex
This work traces the historical movement of the Cockney dialect from East London into Essex, investigating how urban out-migration has transformed the linguistic profile of the county. Over the 20th century, more than a million people left east London, due to, among other things, de-industrialisation, overcrowding and poverty.
To find out if the cockney dialect moved out of east London along with its speakers, I drew up a long list of all the different linguistic elements of cockney or London dialects that were mentioned in 20th-century and early 21st-century publications. I then interviewed the first generation who grew up in a post-WWII council estate in Essex where many East Londoners relocated. I found that those who grew up in Essex overwhelmingly still used nearly all these elements of cockney. This led me to conclude that the Cockney dialect has moved to Essex.
I also found, however, that those born in Essex, particularly younger generations, tend to consider their accent to be an “Essex” one. By contrast, the older generations born in east London are much more likely to consider their accent to be a “cockney” one. This shows the importance of place and belonging in not just how we speak, but how we feel about it. The Cockney dialect has been reinterpreted as a modern-day “Essex” accent. This was a very personal project for me as both sets of my grandparents were relocated by local government from East London to council estates in Essex in the latter half of the 20th century and I was brought up on one of these estates.
Accentism in the South East
An in-depth look at how accents are judged in the South East, exposing deeply ingrained accentism. In this study, 200 people aged 18 to 33 from south-east England were played ten-second audio clips of other young people reading the same sentence. Clips were played of over 100 people from different areas of London and across every county in the south-east.
The participants were not provided with any information about the people whose voices they heard. They were asked to make judgments on sliding scales about how friendly, intelligent and trustworthy they thought each person sounded.
Certain groups were evaluated more negatively than others. Based only on their accent, lower-working-class people were judged to be on average 14% less intelligent, 4% less friendly and 5% less trustworthy than upper-middle-class people. People from ethnic minority backgrounds were evaluated as 5% less intelligent than white people, regardless of class. Compared with other areas of the south-east, negative judgments were made about people from London and Essex.
Accent bias is a mirror of societal biases. It is propping up class prejudice, racial inequality, gender stereotypes and cliched ideas of people from certain areas. Only when we are aware of accentism – and its role in propagating inequalities – can we begin to challenge it.
This is English
I was commissioned by the British Council to lead a project exploring spoken language diversity in the UK and beyond. The findings were used to create a public-facing resources that celebrates the diversity of English across the world. The website was launched on 23rd April 2026 – Englosh Language Day.