Karen V. Beaman

Karen V. Beaman is a post-doctoral fellow in the Quantitative Linguistics department at Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, situated at the heart of her research site. Her primary research interests concern language variation, coherence and change in both apparent-time and real-time, with particular focus on how factors of identity, mobility and social networks drive or inhibit change. She received her PhD in sociolinguistics at Queen Mary University of London on a comparative study of Swabian, a dialect spoken in southwestern Germany, which combines a 35-year panel study with a four-generation trend study, investigating linguistic change across the community, as well as within the individual. Her most recent publications include: "Identity and mobility in linguistic change across the lifespan: The case of Swabian German." To appear in: Ziegler, Arne, Stefanie Edler, Nina Kleczkowski and Georg Oberdorfer (eds.), Urban Matters. Current Approaches of International Sociolinguistic Research (Studies in Language Variation), Benjamins; and “Exploring an approach for modelling lectal coherence”, To appear in the Proceedings of 10th International on Language Variation in Europe (ICLaVE10) (Series on Studies in Language Variation), Nanna Haug Hilton, Remco Knooihuizen, and Hans Van de Velde (eds), Benjamins. She is also co-editor of two volumes published by Routledge: Advancing Socio-Grammatical Variation: In Honour of Jenny Cheshire (co-editor with Isabelle Buchstaller, Sue Fox and James A. Walker) and Language Variation and Change across the Lifespan: Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives from Panel Studies (co-editor with Isabelle Buchstaller).