Lecture on UCU Accent Project (UCU’s 20th Anniversary Festival)

Hugo Quené and Jocelyn Ballantyne are on the program of University College Utrecht‘s 20th Anniversary Festival with a lecture entitled The UCU accent project: what’s unique about UCU English? (See www.uu.nl/en/events/ucu-festival.)

The UCU accent project studies phonetic convergence in a multilingual environment. For a majority of students and teachers at University College Utrecht English, the lingua franca on campus, is their second (or third, …) language. Hence, speaker’s tendency to converge towards each other’s speaking behavior (phonetic convergence) may result in a unique international version of English, influenced by the speakers’ native languages and accents. Such development of an international English accent may also occur in international finance, in military alliances, and in other multilingual teams communicating in English.

For more information on the project, see http://lucea.wp.hum.uu.nl/ or http://portal.clarin.nl/node/4183.