Research Associate in Language Variation

The Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics isseekingto recruit a Postdoctoral Research Associate to support Professor David Willis and theCURLEWProject(Census of Urban and Rural Language in England and Wales), for which anSNSF (Swiss National Science Foundation) grant has been awarded.

The overall role of the post is toco-ordinate andparticipatein datacollectionandanalysisthat will help us fully understand how the socio-economic and demographic changes of the past half-century have steered language change across England and Wales.

The post is for a fixed-term period of48months starting

August 2026 (or as soon as possible thereafter.)

Reporting to the Oxford Principal Investigator, David Willis, the post holder will be a member of the Oxford-basedgroup carrying out research forCURLEW:
Census of Urban and Rural Language in England and Wales.

CURLEW is a four-year project (from August 2026) funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation as part of the International Co-Investigator Scheme with the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). It is a collaboration between Bern, York, and Oxford with teams in each of the participatinginstitutions. The aim of CURLEW is to conduct a census of urban and rural language in England and Wales, providing a rich snapshot of the English language in these countries today using contemporary sociolinguistic sampling techniques, studying a broad cross-section of the population.

Modelled on the successful

Swiss

Dialäktatlas, this project serves as a 21st-century counterpart to the historic

Survey of English Dialectsfrom the 1950sand
60s.

The post holder will be expected to contribute to the planning, co-ordination and execution of the project and its data collection, with specific responsibilities to take the lead on data processing, statistical analysis (including geospatial statistics), and GIS-based mapping.

They will conduct data collection and analysis for the project and provide guidance to junior members of the research group, including research assistants,doctoralstudents, and project participants.

They will alsobe responsible forcomparing contemporary data with historical datasets (such as the Survey of English Dialectsorrelevanthistorical corpora), therebyidentifyingpatterns of linguistic innovation and diffusion. Additionally, they will explore the sociolinguistic and historical factors that have shaped these developments. Like all project members, they will be expected to carry out data collection (primarily remotely) to build the CURLEW corpus.

You will have a doctoral degree in either Linguistics ora relevant related field,together with relevant research experienceandpreviousexperience of contributing to publications and presentations.

The post holder must have sufficient specialist knowledge of relevant areas (such as language variation and change/sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, morphosyntax, history of the English language, geospatiallinguisticsand dialectology) to work with and developtheresearch programme, including the necessary statistical skills to performgeospatial analysis of the results.

You willbe required to upload a supporting statement,CVand two referees as part of your application.

The supporting statement must explain how you meet the selection criteria for the post.

The closing date for applications is
12:00 noonon Friday, 20

February 2026.

Interviews will take place during weekcommencing
Monday,13

March.

£39,424 to £47,779. Grade 7