Dr Sadie Ryan
- Lecturer in Languages and Intercultural Studies (School of Education)
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2854-1741Biography
Sadie completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Glasgow in 2011, graduating in English Literature with first class honours. She went on to complete an MPhil in Linguistics, exploring the use of Glaswegian linguistic features on social media. She then undertook an interdisciplinary PhD in Linguistics and Education, funded by the Lord Kelvin Adam Smith scholarship, focusing on the linguistic and social experiences of Polish adolescents in a Glasgow high school. In particular, it asked to what extent these pupils were acquiring local Glaswegian speech norms, and how this acquisition related to identity and self-perception. After completing her PhD in 2018, she became a Research Associate on the Manchester Voices project at Manchester Metropolitan University, before returning to the University of Glasgow’s School of Education as Lecturer in Languages and Intercultural Studies in 2022. She is a member of the UNESCO-RILA team.
Research interests
Sadie’s research interests include migration, multilingualism, linguistic discrimination, accent and dialect variation, the language of young people, language on social media, and the treatment of language in secondary school education. She also specialises in public engagement, and makes the award-winning linguistics podcast Accentricity [www.accentricity-podcast.com], which is aimed at a public, non-specialist audience, and tries to narrow the gap between academic knowledge about language and people’s everyday linguistic experiences. She aims to spend her academic career developing methods for the study of language which centre and empower the speakers of marginalised varieties and languages, and to throw her weight behind the fight for linguistic justice in Scotland and elsewhere.
