Linguistics at Canterbury

19/08/2026

Another massive contratulations to Steph Foxton who was placed 3rd last night in the UC-wide 3 minute thesis event! Well done Steph for bringing Linguistics front and centre (literally!) and congratulations to all of the other finalists too.

23/07/2026

Congratulations to our doctoral student Steph Foxton who has won the 3 Minute Thesis Faculty of Arts heat. Steph will now represent Arts in the UC final at the Court Theatre on the 19th August. Well done Steph!

15/04/2026

Congratulations to all Linguistics graduates this week! 🎓

27/03/2026

Congratulations to Dr Sidney Wong who tonight defended his PhD thesis entitled "Language, Place, and Social Media: Geographic Dialect Alignment". Well done Sidney!

01/09/2025

For those of you in Christchurch, please consider coming along to support our very own Prof Kevin Watson for his Raising the Bar talk in two weeks. It's so great to see Linguistics being included in these public events

Why do those people talk funny? Wait, do I talk funny? And why don’t kids talk properly these days? They don’t even use grammar*. In this talk we’ll dive into the revealing world of how we speak, why it changes, and what it says about us even when we don’t mean it to. Expect dodgy impression...

19/08/2025

Congratulations to newly minted Dr Gia Hurring who expertly defended her PhD dissertation last night. Thanks also to her examiners Prof Jane Stuart Smith (Glasgow) and Ass Prof Nicolai Pharao (Copenhagen).

24/03/2025

Check out this very cool new study published today by Gia Hurring (PhD student in Linguistics at Canterbury) & Lynn Clark on sound change in the Gloriavale Christian Community!

18/09/2024

Please consider doing this online experiment if you meet the criteria. Thank you!!
https://nzilbbsurvey.canterbury.ac.nz/753741?lang=en

28/07/2024

If you have a spare few minutes, please take the time to complete this survey that we're distributing on behalf of one of our honours students in Linguistics...

"Kia ora,

If you are a speaker of New Zealand English, or have lived in New Zealand since the age of 7, and you are currently aged 18 years and above, please consider participating in this 15–20-minute online survey. The survey will ask you to rate your perception of an author’s certainty in their claims based on sentences and text extracts. This research aims to determine perceptions of certainty based on different word or phrase choices. I am interested in finding out about how speakers of New Zealand English interpret linguistic markers of certainty. The information from this study will help us understand how people perceive attitudes through textual expressions.

This project is being undertaken as part of an Honours in Linguistics degree (LING 480).



For more information, feel free to contact Ruey Fern Tan at [email protected]. "

20/06/2024

Check out this great piece in the Guardian reporting on the research conducted by Stephanie Kaefer, a UC Linguistics alumna.

Dr Steph Kaefer spent three weeks documenting unique colloquialisms on the frozen continent after newcomers were struck by the distinctive vocabulary