Dr Ianto Gruffydd
Research Officer in Linguistics (Welsh)
Overview
I am a research officer working as part of the Language Attitudes Research Team. Our research aims to better understand the relationship between speaker attitudes and language use across different speech communities by using explicit and implicit methods. In a similar vein, I also specialise in attitudes towards different varieties of Welsh and how they are perceived socially. Specifically, I am interested in new speaker accents and traditional accents.
My doctoral research was in the field of language variation and change, specifically examining the sociophonetics of Cardiff Welsh. Currently I am working on the South Wales Speech project with Prof. Mercedes Durham from Cardiff University analysing the sociophonetics of different varieties of South Wales English.
I am also interested in language policy and maintenance, a field directly related to language attitudes and usage. Specifically, I have examined the language use of children, newcomers and businesses across several communities in North Wales.
Additional Contact Information
Email: ianto.gruffydd@bangor.ac.uk
Phone: +44 1248 388238
Location: Room 309, 37-41 College Road
Qualifications
- PhD: A study of language variation in the language revitalisation context of Cardiff Welsh
Cardiff University, 2017–2022 - BA: Welsh
Cardiff University, 2014–2017
Publications
2023
- PublishedAmrywio ffonolegol (ai) yn y sillaf olaf ddiacen yng Nghymraeg Caerdydd
Gruffydd, I., 31 Jul 2023, In: Gwerddon. 35, 1, p. 47-75
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review - PublishedL’ART Research Assistant
Breit, F., Tamburelli, M. & Gruffydd, I., 3 May 2023
Research output: Non-textual form › Software - UnpublishedThe L' ART Research Assistant: A digital toolkit for bilingualism and language attitude research
Breit, F., Tamburelli, M., Gruffydd, I. & Brasca, L., 4 May 2023, (Unpublished).
Research output: Working paper
2022
- PublishedAstudiaeth o amrywio ieithyddol yng nghyd-destun adfywio ieithyddol yng Nghymraeg Caerdydd
Gruffydd, I., 1 Jun 2022
Research output: Other contribution - PublishedWelsh automatic text summarisation
Morris, J., Ezeani, I., Gruffydd, I., Young, K., Davies, L., El-Haj, M. & Knight, D., 28 Jan 2022.
Research output: Contribution to conference › Paper › peer-review
2021
- PublishedVariation in Cardiff Welsh: The close back vowels. (Poster)
Gruffydd, I., 10 Sept 2021.
Research output: Contribution to conference › Poster › peer-review
Activities
2024
- The social perceptions of traditional and new speaker accents in Welsh
The Colloquium of the British Association of Academic Phoneticians will be held at Cardiff University 25 - 27 March 2024. The Colloquium is organised by Cardiff Metropolitan University and Cardiff University.
The Colloquium is open to all doing research in phonetics and speech science (not just members) and postgraduate research students are particularly encouraged to attend.
26 Mar 2024
Links:
Activity: Oral presentation (Speaker) - Attitude asymmetry in bilingual communities reflects differences in socio-political recognition between majority and minority/endangered languages: Evidence from three European communities.
Paper presented at VALS-ASLA 2024:
Asymmetries and inequalities between major languages and regional/minority/endangered languages are often reflected in – as well as a consequence of – language policy and the linguistic attitudes held by speakers of those languages (e.g., Fishman, 1991; Trudgill, 1992; UNESCO, 2003). In this paper, we present two large studies investigating the relationship between language attitudes and different levels of socio-political recognition in three European communities where a minority/endangered language co-exists in an asymmetric relationship with a sociolinguistically dominant language.
The communities under investigation are Lombard-Italian speakers in Italy, Moselle Franconian-German speakers in Belgium, and Welsh-English speakers in Wales. These communities are markedly different in terms of their language policies and the degrees of socio-political recognition of their minority/endangered language. In Wales, the Welsh language enjoys full socio-political recognition and strong public support (e.g. Baker, 2003); in the Eifel region of Belgium, while Moselle Franconian does not enjoy direct recognition, its speakers are a recognised linguistic minority, albeit it as German speaking, with Moselle-Franconian indirectly supported as a closely-related variety of German (Möller, 2017); meanwhile, despite a mention in a regional law, Lombard does not feature among the languages that the Italian government deems worthy of protection, and as such does not benefit from any active policy (Coluzzi, 2007; Coluzzi et al., 2018).
To investigate the potential inequalities that emerge from the different socio-political situations across the three bilingual communities, we collected data from a total of 235 participants aged between 24-36 years employing two different methodologies. This resulted in the collection of attitudinal measurements that varied in degree of explicitness: the Attitudes Towards Language Questionnaire (AToL, Schoel et al., 2013) measured explicit/overt language attitudes, while an adaptation of the Matched Guise Technique (MGT, Lambert, Gardner and Fillenbaum, 1960) measured less overt and more indirect attitudes towards the communities’ languages via the speaker-evaluation paradigm.
Results from the AToL suggest a link between degree of socio-political recognition and overall overt attitude, with Welsh scoring higher than both Moselle Franconian and Lombard, and Moselle-Franconian scoring higher than Lombard.
The link between degree of socio-political recognition and attitudes is further supported by the MGT results, where an interaction between community and attitude score suggests that the attitudes held towards each language type (i.e., majority language vs minority language) depend on the community, with Wales and Belgium scoring the minority/endangered language more positively than the majority language, while Lombardy shows the opposite trend.
Analyses of the solidarity and status components of the MGT show that consistent language policy (e.g., in Wales) is strongly reflected in speakers’ attitudes, while the type of “benign neglect” (e.g., Fishman, 2004: 115) we see in Lombardy tends to continually encourage negative attitudes towards the endangered language, perpetuating asymmetries and possibly accelerating endangerment.
12 Feb 2024 – 13 Feb 2024
Activity: Oral presentation (Speaker)
2023
- Pushing boundaries in the measurement of language attitudes: Combining new technology and standardising practice
Paper presented at Linguistics Beyond and Within 2023:
Speakers’ attitudes are considered a fundamental barometer for the current and future vitality of a language, with recent work emphasising the importance of methodological developments (Kircher & Zipp, 2022). This, together with the growing concern surrounding the replicability of results across the social sciences, including in linguistics (Grieve, 2021), calls for urgent developments in research practices, including the adoption of more consistent and comparable implementations of method. In this paper, we present a series of studies conducted using a newly developed digital application for the collection, storage and transfer of data for research in multilingualism and language attitudes, specifically designed for research in bilingual populations who speak a majority language and a regional/minority/heritage language. This application offers the fundamental benefit of enhancing consistency and comparability within and across studies, which also improves reproducibility, for example by ensuring that presentation of stimuli for a speaker evaluation paradigm (Lambert et al., 1960) is more strictly controlled both across participants and across studies. As the source code is publicly available and version-controlled, other researchers can easily view and reconstruct tasks exactly as they were administered. The application was recently employed across three European communities whose regional/minority languages receive radically different degrees of socio-political recognition: Lombard (Italy), Moselle Franconian (Belgium), and Welsh (UK).Our results reveal fundamental differences in attitude scores depending on measurement type (questionnaire vs. speaker evaluation paradigm). Besides reinforcing the view that different measurements are likely to tap on different attitudinal constructs (e.g., Pantos, 2019), these results also suggest that different measurement methods may gather data on different attitude objects. We argue that this highlights a need for a more holistic approach to the measurement of language attitudes, where a battery of tests – as opposed to a single measure – should become the norm, as it has done in other research areas.
13 Oct 2023
Links:
Activity: Oral presentation (Speaker) - A matter of strength: Language policy, attitudes, and linguistic dominance in three bilingual communities
Paper presented at the 4th International Conference on Multilingualism and Multilingual Education
12 Oct 2023
Links:
Activity: Oral presentation (Speaker) - New developments in documenting attitudes in minority and heritage language situations: an Italian case-study
Paper presented at Documenting languages, Documenting Cultures 2023. The conference focuses on the topic of language documentation from the various perspectives offered by different ‘minority’ situations (migrant languages, minority languages, dialects). Its aim is to provide an interdisciplinary look at a topic which is today the focus of renewed interest, both in epistemological and theoretical terms.
6 Oct 2023
Links:
Activity: Oral presentation (Speaker) - What do you really think about Welsh?
Public outreach presentation at the Llŷn and Eifionydd National Eisteddfod 2023
12 Aug 2023
Activity: Types of Public engagement and outreach - Festival/Exhibition (Speaker) - New avenues in collecting attitudinal data on regional/minority languages: the case of Welsh
Paper presented at the Welsh Linguistics Seminar
27 Jun 2023
Activity: Invited talk (Speaker)
2022
- Cardiff Welsh: the outcomes of new-dialect formation in a language revitalization context.
13 Jun 2022
Activity: Invited talk (Speaker)
2021
- Variation in Cardiff Welsh: the close back vowels
27 Apr 2021
Activity: Invited talk (Speaker) - An introduction to (ai) variation in Welsh
24 Mar 2021
Activity: Invited talk (Speaker)
2020
- Phonetic variation in Cardiff Welsh: the /u(:)/ vowel. What would 1 million Welsh speakers sound like?
Part of a panel session titled 'What would 1 million Welsh speakers sound like' by sociolinguistic PhD students from Cardiff University's School of Welsh considering the effect the Welsh government's 2050 strategy could have on varieties of Welsh.
16 Oct 2020
Activity: Invited talk (Speaker)
2019
- Cyflwyniad i amrywio mewn ysgol uwchradd Gymraeg yng Nghaerdydd
31 Jul 2019
Activity: Invited talk (Speaker)