Richard West-Soley

PhD Linguistics & English Language

  • Linguistics and English Language
  • School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences

Contact details

Address

Street

Dugald Stewart Building

City
3 Charles Street, Edinburgh
Post code
EH8 9AD

Qualifications

University of Oxford (Somerville College), 1995-1999

BA (Hons) in Modern Languages (German and Spanish)

University of Birmingham, 2001-2002

PGCE Secondary Teaching Certificate in Modern Foreign Languages

The Open University, 2010-2015

BSc in Social Sciences (Psychology and Sociology)

The University of Edinburgh, 2020-2022

MSc in Linguistics (Distinction)

 

- Full stack web development (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP)

- Experienced app developer (Swift/SwiftUI for iOS/macOS, Haxe, Flutter)

Undergraduate teaching

LEL 2C, Historical Linguistics

Research summary

My research focuses on the enregisterment of the Black Country English (BCE) dialect through newsprint in the 19th and 20th Centuries. As part of this research, I am working closely with materials from the British Newspaper Archive, compiling an extensive corpus of BCE texts tagged for multiple levels of linguistic analysis.

Alongside my dialect research, I am developing and extending methodologies for working with degraded or poorly encoded textual archive material, including the use of machine learning and LLM tools for text processing and tagging.