Professor David Willis gives this year's Anna Morpurgo Davies lecture: What social media can tell us about dialect variation and change

Professor David Willis gave this year’s Anna Morpurgo Davies lecture What social media can tell us about dialect variation and change on Friday, 10 May, at the Royal Society and online. From the English constructions “Where’s that to?” (widespread in south-western England and southern Wales) and “Where to’s that?” (mostly in southern Wales) to variation between Welsh heddiw and heddi (‘today’), to variant forms of the definite article in Haitian Creole, we learned how social media data can improve our understanding of dialect variation and change. Thank you, David!

The Anna Morpurgo Davies lectures are an annual series established by the Philological Society and the British Academy in honour of Anna Morpurgo Davies, who was Professor of Comparative Philology and then Diebold Professor of Comparative Philology at the University of Oxford, from 1971 to 2004.