Visiting scholar: Yolandi Ribbens-Klein

Yolandi Ribbens-Klein, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the UCT, Cape Town, is visiting MultiLing for a four week-research stay. 

Photo: Private/researchgate.net

A part of the INTPART network project

Ribbens-Klein's visit forms part of the academic staff mobility facilitated by INTPART (International Partnerships for Excellent Education, Research and Innovation), which funds collaborations between MultiLing and four South-African universities. 

Research on varieties of South African English 

Ribbens-Klein graduated with a PhD in Linguistics at the University of Cape Town in December 2016, and her thesis was about the indexicality of Afrikaans rhotic variation, place and belonging.

Since April 2017 she is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow within Professor Rajend Mesthrie’s South African Research Chairs Initiative (SARChI; National Research Foundation) project ‘Language, Migration and Social Change’ in the Linguistics Section (School of African & Gender Studies, Anthropology & Linguistics, University of Cape Town). She works on the project’s data of varieties of South African English. Specifically, her objective is to do sociophonetic analyses of rhotic variation in the speech of Afrikaans-English bilinguals.

Ribbens-Klein's research interests are as follows: variationist sociolinguistics (specifically production and perception of variation and change in present-day varieties of Afrikaans and South African English), with an interest in incorporating linguistic anthropological approaches to situated, contextually created social meanings through ways of speaking (specifically linguistic ideologies and the discursive constructions of language, place, and belonging). Furthermore, she is also interested in acoustic and articulatory phonetics (specifically of rhotics), and phonological theory (specifically overlap, parallel innovation or sociophonetic transfer in English-Afrikaans bilingual phonologies). 

 

You can read more about Ribbens-Klein and her research at uct.academia.edu and at researchgate.net.

Published Oct. 23, 2017 11:59 AM - Last modified Oct. 23, 2017 12:02 PM