Matt Hunt Gardner, PhD (Toronto)

Profile

I’m a queer Canadian sociolinguist working in the United Kingdom. Sociolinguistics is the study of the intersection of language and society, and, as a sociolinguist, I try to figure out how these two relate.

I work with large language datasets using statistical modelling to find patterns of grammatical variability and trajectories of grammatical change. This has allowed me to study the origins of Canadian Maritime English, how the Low Back Merger Shift has developed across North American English, and, most recently, the cognitive burden (or lack thereof) on a speaker deciding between multiple ways of the saying the same thing. I’ve also investigated how pronunciation is linked to different high school social groups and how new technologies might be changing the way we communicate with each other. 

Broadly, I aim to better understand how and why grammatical systems diverge and converge. I have worked on varieties of North American, British, Australian, Hong Kong, and Filipino English, and have collaborated with students on Dutch, French, German, Hungarian, SerBoCroatian, and Chinese languages.

Teaching

At Queen Mary University London I will be teaching the following in the 2024-2025 academic year:

LIN 212 History of English

LIN 5211/7213 Sociolinguistic Variation and Change

LIN 101 Language Acquisition

LIN 6034/7034 Multilingualism and Bilingualism

Research

Research Interests:

• Language Variation and Change
• Sociolinguistics
• Sociophonetics
• Cognitive Linguistics
• Dialectology
• Canadian Maritime English and other non-mainstream English varieties, especially in the Scottish diaspora