Charles Wilson (AHRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Celtic Languages Scholarship)
Thesis title: In development
PhD in Celtic and Scottish Studies
Year of study: 3
- Celtic and Scottish Studies
- School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures
Contact details
PhD supervisor:
Background
During his academic career, Charles has studied at the University of Wales Swansea, Birkbeck University of London, and University College London. Charles has worked on research projects looking at sociophonetics in Welsh and Welsh English at Bangor and Cambridge Universities, and looking at the morphosyntax of Scottish Gaelic at Queen Mary University of London. Having also taught Welsh in Poland and London, Charles has come to the University of Edinburgh on an AHRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Celtic Languages scholarship to research Scottish Gaelic dialect morphology for his PhD.
Qualifications
BA (Hons) (Wales) MA (London)
Undergraduate teaching
Welsh Lead Tutor at the University of Edinburgh Centre for Open Learning http://www.ed.ac.uk/studying/short-courses/subjects/languages-courses/welsh
Tutor in Introduction to Gaelic Language and Culture
Research summary
For his PhD, Charles is looking at the variation of Scottish Gaelic morphosyntax in the conversational material recorded for the Linguistic Survey of Scotland between 1950 and 1963, now held at the University of Edinburgh's Scottish Studies Archive. With Dr William Lamb and Prof Wilson McLeod as his supervisors, Charles intends to collect more data in order to document some of the severely-endangered dialects of Scottish Gaelic. With these two corpora, Charles will employ the dialectometric approach to test the effect of geography and language shift on morphosyntactic variation.
Current research interests
Scottish Gaelic; Gaelic linguistics; dialectology; dialectometry; morphology; corpus linguistics; linguistic variationPast research interests
Welsh; Welsh English; phonology; sociophoneticsProject activity
Charles is currently working on a project in collaboration with and funded by the Equality Network. The project aims to collect stories, terms, and words from Gaelic-speakers regarding LGBTQ+ identities and issues, with the long-term goal of providing education and publicity material around LGBTQ+ diversity and equality in Gaelic and for Gaelic-speaking communities in Scotland.
Charles has previously supported colleagues working on a research project on Scottish Gaelic grammar variation. Known as LEACAG (Leasachadh Còrpais na Gàidhlig (Gaelic Corpus Development)), the aim of the project is to provide guidance on modern Scottish Gaelic grammar usage, indicating potential linguistic change. This research project is being undertaken by the inter-university Soillse research team at the University of Glasgow, University of Edinburgh, and Sabhal Mòr Ostaig.
Wilson, C. & M. Deuchar (2017) Extralinguistic factors influencing the pronunciation of Welsh-English bilinguals in 'Bilingualism and Minority Languages: Current trends and developments', edited by Fraser Lauchlan and Maria Carmen. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Secretary for the Organizing Committee of the Seachdain na Gàidhlig Edinburgh Gaelic Festival http://edinburghgaelicfestival.com/