Last week we were very privileged to host Ebtihal Asiry and Jane Stuart-Smith at our research group meeting.

Ebtihal presented on “Investigating phonological variation in the English of Iraqi Arabs in two UK cities: London and Glasgow” (slides here), her PhD project, which is fascinating work on contrasting Iraqi immigrants in London who are two communities, a large longstanding (1960s) middle class community and more recent (2003) refugees/asylum seekers; and those in Glasgow who are a small, recent community (1999).

Jane presented on her current project, SPADE, which “aims to develop and apply user-friendly software for large-scale speech analysis of existing public and private English speech datasets.”