Robin Dodsworth

Robin Dodsworth is a Professor in the Department of English at North Carolina State University, within the College of Humanities and Social Sciences. His research focuses on language variation and change, acoustic phonetics, and social networks, particularly studying vowel change in Raleigh, NC. He leads a project analyzing over 300 residents' speech data to explore the Southern Vowel Shift's decline due to migration patterns.

Education: Ph.D. in Linguistics from The Ohio State University (2005).

Research Interests: His work integrates sociological and linguistic theories to investigate how social networks influence sound change, dialect contact, and migration impacts on language. Recent projects include the NSF-funded 'Speech Across Dialects of English (SPADE)' (2017-2020) and studies on social class and occupation in sociolinguistics.

Linguistic Employment Niches: Highlights how dialects vary across industries in the American South. Network Cohesion: Examines community structures affecting vowel retention in Raleigh. Migration Studies: Explores dialect reallocation through large-scale migration patterns.

Funded Research: Multiple grants including NSF awards totaling over $450,000, NC State grants, and collaborative projects with institutions like Penn Working Papers in Linguistics.

Labs/Teams: Active in interdisciplinary collaborations, including the Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies and linguistic network analysis initiatives.