Dr Anna Tristram

  • Daphne Jackson Trust Research Fellow
Dr Anna Tristram

Contact

Location

  • Phonetics Lab, Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics
  • Raised Faculty Building, University of Cambridge, Sidgwick Avenue, CB3 9DA

About

Anna Tristram completed her PhD at the University of Cambridge in 2011. She was appointed Lecturer in French Studies at Queen’s University Belfast in 2013 and promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2020. After a period as Head of Modern Languages in an independent school, she was appointed Teaching Associate in French Linguistics at the University of Cambridge in 2022, and now holds a Daphne Jackson Trust Research Fellowship, funded by the British Academy.

Anna’s current research project is a sociolinguistic study of the variety of English spoken in Corby, Northants. While much work on linguistic variation and change (LVC) has focused on multicultural contexts in large cities such as London, Manchester and Birmingham, much less is known about how migration affects small-town or rural contexts, which – relative to the size of the population – have received large numbers of non-UK migrants. This project builds on previous research which examined how past in-migration, notably from Scotland, shaped a distinct Corby dialect. Through a real-time analysis of LVC, comparing the Dyer corpus (recorded in 1998) with a new corpus collected for this project from a stratified sample of people, this timely study investigates what is happening to the Corby dialect now, in the face of increased and more diverse mobility. The findings will advance our understanding of how population changes affect local identity and community cohesion, and shed light on LVC in a small-town, semi-rural context.

Anna also has research interests in sociohistorical linguistics, language and identity, language attitudes, prescriptivism and standard language ideology across English and French. A recent project, published in Historical and Sociolinguistic Approaches to French (OUP, 2024), used a combination of quantitative and qualitative methodologies to explore a corpus of tweets collected from the social media platform Twitter/X to look at attitudes to inclusive writing/écriture inclusive, contributing to a growing body of sociolinguistic literature which considers attitudes to specific language features, as opposed to language varieties or dialects.

Research

Research interests: 

  • Language variation and change 
  • Dialect contact
  • Language and identity 
  • Language attitudes and ideologies 
  • Language and gender
  • Prescriptivism and standard language ideology

Published works: 

Books

  • Tristram, A. 2014. Variation and Change in French Morphosyntax: the Case of Collective Nouns, Research Monographs in French Studies 40, Oxford: Legenda.

Journal articles and book chapters

  • Tristram, A. 2024. Attitudes on Twitter towards French ‘inclusive writing’, in Historical and Sociolinguistic Approaches to French, J. Carruthers, O. Walsh & M. McLaughlin (eds.), Oxford University Press.
  • Tristram, A. 2020. Variation and change in future temporal reference with avoir and être, Journal of French Language Studies, 1-25. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0959269520000174
  • Tristram, A. 2015. ‘L'accord sujet-verbe en français contemporain: une étude de cas – la/une foule’, Revue Romane 50 (2): 191-221.
  • Tristram, A. 2014 (online 2013). ‘Diachronic Change in Verbal Agreement Patterns with Majorité’, Transactions of the Philological Society 112 (3): 344-366. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1467-968X.12030
  • Tristram, A. & W. Ayres-Bennett. 2012. ‘From Negation to Agreement: Revisiting the Problem of Sources for Socio-Historical Linguistics’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 113(3): 365-393.

Conference proceedings

  • Tristram, A. 2010. ‘L’accord sujet-verbe en français contemporain: une étude de variation sociale’, in Proceedings of the Congrès Mondial de Linguistique Française, New Orleans, USA, July 2010, ed. by Franck Neveu, Valelia Muni Toke, Thomas Klingler, Jacques Durand, Lorenz Mondada & Sophie Prévost http://dx.doi.org/10.1051/cmlf/2010115
  • Tristram, A. 2009. ‘L'accord sujet-verbe en français contemporain: une étude de variation grammaticale et sociale’, Proceedings of the Rencontres Jeunes Chercheurs, Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris III, June 2009, CORELA (Cognition, Représentation, Langage) http://corela.edel.univ-poitiers.fr/index.php?id=2614

Reviews

  • Tristram, A. 2016 Review of Rutten, Gijsbert, Rik Vosters & Wim Vandenbussche (eds.). 2014. Norms and Usage in Language History, 1600–1900. A Sociolinguistic and Comparative Perspective (Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics 3). Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Published in Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics 2 (1): 131–135. DOI 10.1515/jhsl-2016-0007

Teaching and supervision

Teaching interests: 

  • French (socio)linguistics
  • History of French
  • English (socio)linguistics

Course contact for: 

Li14: The History of the French Language [currently suspended]