Minna Korhonen

Her PhD research focused on sociolinguistic variation in Australian English with a special interest in the alleged Americanisation of Australian English. Her main research interests include Australian English, sociolinguistics, spoken language, language attitudes, language variation and change and corpus linguistics.

My PhD, entitled , focuses on sociolinguistic variation in Australian English with a special interest on the alleged Americanisation of Australian English. In this study, I examine the use of a variety of phonological/lexical and grammatical features in Australian English that have been shown to differ in their usage between British English and American English. In addition, the speakers’ attitudes towards American English influence are examined. The research material for my PhD consists of sociolinguistic interviews with 69 speakers representing three age groups (adolescent, middle-aged and older participants). I collected the material in the small country town of Blayney in New South Wales in 2005 and 2006.

In addition to continuing my research of sociolinguistic variation in present-day Australian English, my current research involves the diachronic investigation of language variation and change as reflected in the Australian Hansard. In terms of this research, I am involved in a corpus compilation project at Macquarie University in Sydney. The first phase of the project has involved the compilation of a comparable diachronic corpus of the Australian, British and South African Hansard, covering the period 1900 to 2015. The ongoing second phase of the project aims to compile a corpus of transcribed audio recordings of parliamentary debates from the same time period in Australian and South African English. The main aim of the project is to investigate how language, stylistic and register change occurs across the three varieties of English and to compare the Hansard with the verbatim transcriptions of the audio recordings.