Nicolai Pharao

Primary fields of research

Sociophonetics

Current research

Phonetic variation and the relation to gender and sexual orientation

Experimental studies of attitudes to segmental variation in Copenhagen Danish

Experimental studies of the processing of spontaneous speech forms and regionally based phonetic variation

Teaching

I primarily teach the courses Acoustic phonetics and Linguistic theory in the BA programme in Linguistics.

Previous courses I have (co-)taught are: Danish language 1 in the BA programme in Danish and MA courses on sociolinguistics, experimental phonetics, the mental lexicon, and language, gender and sexuality. I have also taught ph.d. courses in phonetics and phonology, acoustic phonetics and experimental phonetics in both Denmark and the UK.

I give supervision on all types of investigations of phonetic variation (corpus investigations, acoustic studies, perception studies, language attitude studies)

Fields of interest

I am also interested in:

Articulation

Social meaning

Short presentation

In my dissertation research I studied processes of lenition of consonants in Copenhagen Danish with a particular focus on the role of word frequency in the spread of reduction processes across the lexicon and over time. The research was based on analysis of large corpora of spontaneously spoken Copenhagen Danish.

In my post-doctoral research I focused on how speakers influence each other with respect to consonant reduction, and also began a series of perception experiments examining the social categories associated with particular phonetic features of Danish, both segmental and prosodic. The experimental strand was partly developed in collaboration with colleagues at the LANCHART Center.

I have continued to focus on the experimental study of the link between phonetic variation and social categories as an associate professor while also beginning to study the link between linguistic processing and social processing of phonetic variation. This research is conducted in collaboration with colleagues at the LANCHART Center and the Department of Scandinavian Studies and Linguistics.

CV

2013 – present  
Associate professor, Department of Scandinavian Studies and Linguistics, University of Copenhagen

2013
Associate professor, DNRF Center for Sociolinguistic Studies of Language Change in Real Time, LANCHART, University of Copenhagen

2010 – 2012
Post. doc., Creativity and Dynamics in the Processes of Language Conventionalization, collective research project funded by the The Danish Council for Independent Research | Humanities

2010
Awarded the PhD degree at the Faculty of Humanities, University of Copenhagen for the dissertation “Consonant Reduction in Copenhagen Danish”

2006 – 2009
PhD student (specialization: phonetics), Department of Scandinavian Studies and Linguistics, University of Copenhagen

Knowledge of languages

Danish and English (fluently)