Researcher from the Frieske Academy to the United States for research on language change

Voeten receives a Rubicon grant to gain research experience abroad. He will spend two years on his research at the University of Pennsylvania in the United States.

Dutch scientists with a recent doctorate are awarded a grant by the NWO (Organization for Scientific Research in the Netherlands).

Voeten, along with linguists and biologists, will look at language change from an evolutionary perspective in his research. Using biological and linguistic techniques, he will analyze a large database of alphabetical changes in Philadelphia dialect.

Driving force

As a postgraduate researcher, he is affiliated with the ‘Frisian Laboratory Sociology’ program at Frieske Academy. The purpose of this project is to map the language variation and language changes in Frisian and to uncover the basic mechanisms.

The knowledge and experience gained by Voeten will be used for linguistic (laboratory) research on Frisian, and will contribute to the development of Frisian knowledge infrastructure.

Language change

A clear picture of the reasons for language change makes it easier to predict which features of variation (including Frisian) will lead to language changes and which factors will need to be closely monitored by language technology applications.

In this way, early changes and changes that are currently taking place can be detected and studied at an early stage. This makes it possible to make language technology applications a more future source for possible and current changes in Frisian.

Programs such as Frisian Speech Recognition benefit by responding to potential changes in a timely manner.