Moragh Gordon

I am a lecturer in historical sociolinguistics at Leiden University (NL) and also teach courses in English language proficiency and second language acquisition at Utrecht University (NL). My research interests lie in (historical) sociolinguistics, language variation and change, corpus linguistics, (historical) dialectology, language and dialect contact, and language standardisation.

In 2013 I became part of the EMST project as a PhD student at Utrecht University. In 2017 I successfully defended my dissertation, which focusses on the vernacular of Bristol between 1400-1700. I am particularly interested in how external factors such as literacy and trade patterns may have contributed to the introduction of supra-local linguistic features in Bristol texts. Additionally, I also consider how supra-loacalisation processes interact with the Bristol vernacular. As Bristol held a prominent position in both national and international trade, it was a hub of migration, text-production and dialect contact. It also maintained important ties with London, which I find particularly interesting, as the metropolis is often seen as one of the most important centres from which most supra-local forms diffused.