Michael Ramsammy

Reader in Linguistics

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

Contact details

Address

Street

Room 3.03, Dugald Stewart Building

City
3 Charles Street, Edinburgh
Post code
EH8 9AD

Availability

  • Office hours:
    My office is 3.03 in Dugald Stewart Building. I don't have set weekly office hours. Please email m.ramsammy@ed.ac.uk to arrange an appointment.

Undergraduate teaching

In 2025–26, I’ll be teaching on the following courses:

  • LASC10096 Historical Linguistics
  • LASC10102 Language Variation and Change

Postgraduate teaching

  • LASC11089 Introduction to Phonology (MSc)
  • LASC11129 Historical Linguistics 

 

I'm also the programme director for the MSc in Linguistics (see here: http://www.ed.ac.uk/studying/postgraduate/degrees/index.php?r=site/view&id=908).  Please get in touch if you have any enquiries about this programme.

Open to PhD supervision enquiries?

Yes

Areas of interest for supervision

I'm happy to supervise PhD and MSc projects that align with my research interests.  Below is a list of titles of some dissertations and theses that I've supervised in recent years.  Potential students should feel free to contact me directly to discuss research supervision with me.

 

Recent dissertation/thesis titles:

  • The phonetics of emphasis in Central Mount Lebanon Lebanese: acoustics, perception, articulation
  • Clisis and hypocoristic formation in Romance: a stratal optimality-theoretic approach
  • Plurilingualism, intercomprehension and positive transfer: acquisition of mood and aspect in L2 and L3 Spanish
  • Morphological variation in Bangla: exploring patterns of gender and age-based variation in child-directed speech
  • Pseudo-gemination and external sandhi in Modern Standard Hindi
  • Unnatural consonant epenthesis doesn't exist
  • The social meaning of /r/ in Austrian German
  • Vowel qualities and language attitudes of Derby adolescents: a study of PRICE, TRAP/BATH and FOOT/STRUT
  • The Realness: style-shifting in drag performance
  • The acquisition of /l/-darkening by Spanish-English bilinguals
  • The effect of iconicity on L2 acquisition of British Sign Language
  • I see what you did there. Iconicity aids the acquisition of signs in the gestural modality.
  • To what extent does Kazakh have rounding harmony?

 

Current PhD students supervised

Research summary

I have a broad range of interests in Linguistics.  These include (but are not limited to) the following:

  • Experimental and theoretical phonology
  • Articulatory and acoustic phonetics
  • Historical phonology and sound change
  • Sign language linguistics, with a focus on BSL
  • Romance Linguistics, with a focus on Portuguese and Spanish
  • South Asian languages
  • Caribbean Creole Englishes, especially Guyanese Creole English
  • Sociophonetics and language variation 

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