During our annual Fund Drive, we like to feature undergraduate and MA students who have gone above and beyond the classroom to participate in the wider field of linguistics. Selected nominees exemplify a commitment to not only academic performance, but also to the field of linguistics and principles of scientific inquiry. Since this year’s Fund Drive theme is Future tense, we are especially thankful to be able to highlight undergraduate and MA students who are emerging as the future leaders in our field.

Today’s Rising Star is Erika Sajtós, an MA student at PPCU Budapest / Pannon Veszprém (Hungary). Erika was nominated by her adviser, Katalin Balogné Bérces. Katalin writes:

Erika was my supervisee for her BA thesis, which she wrote in the summer holidays before her third year. That was because she was, and still is, carrying out her studies as a part-timer (or: correspondence student), i.e., attending classes on Saturdays, and working full-time (and managing her family) otherwise. She defended her thesis successfully, and immediately she started developing it into a more comprehensive project. Without enrolling in any training programmes, she carried on researching for a year (incl. learning how to use Praat, all on her own!), simply because she found enjoyment in it, and I was happy to keep advising her. She's participated in a number of conferences now, including TWIST (https://conference.studieverenigingtwist.nl/2021/student-speakers), Symposium on Historical Phonology (http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/symposium-on-historical-phonology/pdf/eshp5-final-prog.pdf), and BICLCE 2022 (https://biclce22.ff.uni-lj.si/programme/). She published an early version of her project/paper in https://essenglish.org/messenger/vol-30-1-summer-2021/. Currently, she's a (part-time) MA student in English Studies.
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When asked about the topics she sees emerging as important or especially interesting in the field of linguistics, and how she hopes to contribute in the future, Erika writes:

As Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the French philosopher and writer said ‘Accent is the soul of language: it gives to it both feeling and truth.’ Indeed, the way how speakers exploit variation to project their identity has always amazed me. Also, I am equally excited about language change, or more specifically, changes in pronunciation – not just the process itself, but the motivation and causes behind it. Thus, among the different areas of linguistics, I am particularly interested in sociophonetics, a young branch of linguistics. Modern computational tools of phonetics such as the Praat software, used for acoustic analysis, can be combined with sociolinguistics, and important data regarding social variation on various levels can be gained. Additionally, these tools can be used in historical linguistics to study the development of languages, opening the way to use new methods in this field.

The use of modern phonetic tools in historical linguistics makes it possible to detect changes in pronunciation and determine when they occurred, which is important from a theoretical point of view, for the reconstruction of an earlier form of a language. It is especially true in the case of relatively young language varieties such as New Zealand English, the youngest inner circle variety of English. As recordings of New Zealand speakers are available from the early stages of this variety, it provides the opportunity to track how its pronunciation changed over time. With the worldwide spread of English, new Expanding Circle varieties emerge, and by applying newly developed phonetic methods in historical linguistics, these new varieties and the way in which they evolved can be described more accurately than before.

I find sociophonetics, the interface of sociolinguistics and experimental phonetics, even more fascinating because the results of acoustic measurements complement the existing knowledge of sociolinguistics allowing researchers to explore the relationship between language variation and identity, and variation in language change in general. As languages constantly change, the usage potential of acoustic measurements as tools has great importance. Currently, I am about to finish my project, in which I investigate social variation in New Zealand English in different registers within the same social class, and also how linguistic norms affect the patterns in these registers and the social connotation of vowel sounds.

While I am working on a project, new and intriguing research questions arise, showing the new direction of my research. While previously I focused on vowels, in my next project, I am planning to examine changes in the realisation of consonant sounds in different periods of New Zealand English in the speech of male and female speakers. I intend to investigate these changes from both a historical and sociolinguistic point of view using the methods of experimental phonetics focusing on whether men and women had a shared constraint hierarchy from the beginning or whether it emerged only at a later stage. I am planning to continue my studies in the PhD programme in theoretical linguistics and investigate this issue during those years.
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The LINGUIST List looks forward to continuing to serve the linguistics community, including its up-and-coming stars, for years to come. You can contribute to our Fund Drive here: https://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate