Rasmus Puggaard-Rode has been awarded a small John Fell Fund grant to investigate the phonetics of an ongoing sound change in Danish, whereby the consonant /d/ is developing into a vowel. Drawing on a very large speech corpus where speakers of Danish have been repeatedly recorded over an extended period of time, the project takes a small step towards answering a big question: does language change in the short term mainly progress because younger generations diverge from older generations, or does language change mainly progress as individuals change throughout their lifespan?

This project will kickstart a collaboration between the Oxford Phonetics Lab and the Copenhagen-based Centre for Language Change in Real Time.