Dr Anna Tristram

Anna Tristram completed her PhD at the University of Cambridge in 2011. She was appointed Lecturer in French Studies at Queen’s University Belfast in 2013 and promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2020. After a period as Head of Modern Languages in an independent school, she was appointed Teaching Associate in French Linguistics at the University of Cambridge in 2022, and now holds a Daphne Jackson Trust Research Fellowship, funded by the British Academy.

Anna’s current research project is a sociolinguistic study of the variety of English spoken in Corby, Northants. While much work on linguistic variation and change (LVC) has focused on multicultural contexts in large cities such as London, Manchester and Birmingham, much less is known about how migration affects small-town or rural contexts, which – relative to the size of the population – have received large numbers of non-UK migrants. This project builds on previous research which examined how past in-migration, notably from Scotland, shaped a distinct Corby dialect. Through a real-time analysis of LVC, comparing the Dyer corpus (recorded in 1998) with a new corpus collected for this project from a stratified sample of people, this timely study investigates what is happening to the Corby dialect now, in the face of increased and more diverse mobility. The findings will advance our understanding of how population changes affect local identity and community cohesion, and shed light on LVC in a small-town, semi-rural context.

Anna also has research interests in sociohistorical linguistics, language and identity, language attitudes, prescriptivism and standard language ideology across English and French. A recent project, published in Historical and Sociolinguistic Approaches to French (OUP, 2024), used a combination of quantitative and qualitative methodologies to explore a corpus of tweets collected from the social media platform Twitter/X to look at attitudes to inclusive writing/écriture inclusive, contributing to a growing body of sociolinguistic literature which considers attitudes to specific language features, as opposed to language varieties or dialects.