Sophie Holmes-Elliott

Sophie Holmes-Elliott is a Senior Lecturer in Sociolinguistics and Director of Postgraduate Research at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL), based in the Department of Linguistics within the School of Languages, Linguistics and Film. She holds a PhD from the University of Glasgow. Her research focuses on quantitative analysis of linguistic variation and change, particularly in childhood and adolescence, and the intersection of language with gender, identity, and social class.

Her educational background includes a doctoral degree from the University of Glasgow, where her thesis examined the spread of metropolitan linguistic features in southeast England. She leads the My Generation Why project, combining real and apparent time methodologies to study early lifespan changes in language, and collaborates on projects like the bidialectalism study with Jennifer Smith (University of Glasgow) and the gendered evaluation of football commentators with Matthew Hunt and Louis Strange.

Research Interests: Holmes-Elliott’s work spans developmental sociolinguistics, gendered language patterns, sociophonetics, and the sociolinguistic role of children in propagating change. She explores how linguistic variation emerges during adolescence and how gendered speech styles develop into recognizable linguistic personas.

Publications: Her recent work includes studies on gender perceptions in sports commentary (Gender Penalty?), the sociophonetic analysis of Modern RP (The jet set), and structural change across lifespans. She is co-authoring a book on preadolescent sociolinguistic competence, contracted with Routledge (due 2025).

Teaching: She teaches undergraduate and postgraduate courses such as LIN4211 (English in Use), LIN6019 (Sex, Gender & Language), and postgraduate modules on sociolinguistic theory and research methods.

Grants and Projects: Supported by the BA/Leverhulme Small Grants for the My Generation Why project, she also contributes to ESRC-funded research on bidialectalism. Her work frequently involves experimental methods and corpus-based analysis of reality TV and sports commentary.

Labs/Teams: She is part of QMUL’s Linguistics Research Groups, including the Sociolinguistics Research Group and the Experimental Linguistics Research Group. She actively supervises postgraduate students in sociolinguistics, sociophonetics, and language change.