13 Aug Catherine Travis on Ethnicity and social class in a modern metropolis

Hosted by the Sydney Centre for Language Research, Catherine Travis from the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, Australian National University presented a seminar on ‘Ethnicity and social class in a modern metropolis’ on 13 August 2021.

Sydney is a highly multilingual and multicultural city — close to 40% of the population report speaking a language other than English at home, and in some suburbs, this proportion rises to nearly 90%. Greater diversity is found in the less privileged Western and South -Western suburbs than in the traditionally wealthier Northern and Eastern suburbs. While these socio-regional differences are an often noted feature of the city, their linguistic effects have not been widely examined. In this talk, Catherine Travis considers the intersection between ethnicity, social class and region in English spoken in Sydney, based on research deriving from a large-scale sociolinguistic project examining variation and change in Australian English, Sydney Speaks. To find out more about the work of the Sydney Centre for Language Research, visit https://sydneylanguageresearch.org/. To find out more about the Sydney Speaks project, visit http://www.dynamicsoflanguage.edu.au/sydney-speaks/.

Watch the seminar on the SCLR Youtube channel here: