Guest Lecture: Dr. Kate Tallon (University of Oxford, UK), "English and Irish in Contact: Sociophonetic Perspectives"

This talk presents a sociophonetic analysis of Connemara English, comparing bilingual Irish–English speakers with local monolingual English speakers. Using quantitative acoustic methods, it examines variation in key Irish English features, including vowel contrasts and consonantal variation. The results show systematic differences between bilingual and monolingual speakers that vary by social factors such as age, gender, linguistic background, and attachment to local area. This reveals ongoing change in the Gaeltacht. These findings challenge accounts that characterise Gaeltacht English as straightforwardly influenced by L1 Irish and instead suggest a more complex interaction between bilingualism, conservatism, and language change.

Dr. Kate Tallon is currently a departmental lecturer in Phonetics and Phonology at  the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics at the University of Oxford, where she is co-affiliated with St Catherine's College and St John's College and also works as an Educational Development Advisor at Oxford's Center for Teaching and Learning. Dr. Tallon studied at Oxford and University College London, and received her PhD from Trinity College Dublin. Her current research focuses on sociophonetic variation of English spoken in Ireland, with focus on language contact between Irish and English. https://www.ling-phil.ox.ac.uk/people/kate-tallo

Registration 

If you are interested in participating in this online event, please sign up by submitting this registration form or by sending an email with the subject line “TALLON” to irishstudies@uni-wuerzburg.de by April 19, 2026. Please include your full name and affiliation. Online participants will receive a zoom link to the event in due time. Please note that the above given email address is used solely for registration purposes. If you want to contact ISWÜ, please use the contact information given below.

Contact
Irish Studies Würzburg (ISWÜ)
Prof. Dr. Ina Bergmann & Prof. Dr. Maria Eisenmann
ina.bergmann@uni-wuerzburg.de,  maria.eisenmann@uni-wuerzburg.de