In traditional dialectology, linguists travel to selected localities to collect data from mostly older speakers. With the advent of smartphone and web-apps, surveying people can be done online via so-called crowdsourcing. In this talk I will present how, over the past years, we crowdsourced data from speakers of British English via smartphone apps and Twitter. I will showcase findings on the FOOT / STRUT split, TH-fronting, as well as dative alternation (amongst others). Collecting data in this way comes at a price: substantial noise in the data (literally and metaphorically). To end the talk (and somewhat off-topic), I want to address the issue of linguistic data collection during a pandemic – a very current topic – and discuss how a combination of new methods (e.g. apps and videoconferencing) enables the continuation of high-quality data collection, despite a global emergency such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

If you would like to listen to this guest lecture, please contact Dr. Jakob Leimgruber to obtain the necessary Zoom link.