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.

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.

My doctoral research was in the field of language variation and change, specifically examining the sociophonetics of Cardiff Welsh. More recently I have worked on different varieties of South Wales English in towns outside of Cardiff.

Email: ianto.gruffydd@bangor.ac.uk

Phone: +44 1248 388238

Location: Room 309, 37-41 College Road

  • PhD: A study of language variation in the language revitalisation context of Cardiff Welsh
    Cardiff University, 2017–2022
  • BA: Welsh
    Cardiff University, 2014–2017

2023

2022

2021

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

2021

2020

2019