Completed PhD Student

Merryn Davies-Deacon

Queen’s University Belfast

Contact email:
mdaviesdeacon01@qub.ac.uk
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As a member of strand 3 of the MEITS project, Merryn worked on regional minority languages of France, with a particular focus on Breton. This PhD research considered questions relating to ‘new speaker’ identity, national and regional language policy, and in particular the relationship between use of standard/non-standard lexemes and new speaker status, drawing on a corpus of Breton taken from media sources, as well as interviews with speakers and policymakers. This work aimed to assess critically both the ‘new speaker’ category found in academic discourse and the effectiveness of French regional language policy in catering for ‘new speakers’ of various kinds. Prior to joining MEITS, Merryn studied at Oxford and York, at the latter undertaking an MA by research which focused on ideological issues in orthography development in the Cornish language revival and the acceptance of standard orthographies in Cornish and Breton.


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