*🎓 *We are happy to announce the next webinar in the CIRCE online seminar series, organized by the CIRCE https://www.circe-project.eu/ project in collaboration with DFCLAM University of Siena https://www.dfclam.unisi.it/it, H2IOSC https://www.h2iosc.cnr.it/ project and CNR-ILC.

*Speaker*: _Rob Drummond_ (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK)

*Title*: Ten things everybody should know about (spoken) language

*Date*: Monday, March 31, 2025 - 16:30 CET

*Venue*: Online Attendees: Secondary school teachers, researchers, language instructors

*Summary*: I spend a lot of my time trying to persuade people to have a more accepting attitude towards language variation and language change. In fact, we should be doing a lot more than accepting it – we should be enjoying it and celebrating the fact that we all use language in different ways. We should take time to appreciate the fundamental connection between the way we speak, and who we are. In this talk, I will present my top ten reflections and insights that aim to improve everyone’s relationship with their own, and other people’s, use of English.

*Bio*: Rob Drummond is Professor of Sociolinguistics at Manchester Metropolitan University, where he researches, teaches and writes about the relationship between spoken language and identity. He recently led the community-focused Manchester Voices project, exploring the accents, dialects and identities of people in Greater Manchester, and he co-leads The Accentism Project, which strives to challenge and raise awareness of language-based prejudice. Rob does a lot of public-facing academic work and is the author of You’re All Talk: Why we are what we speak (Scribe Publications, 2023), a book for a general audience that sheds light on the fascinating relationship between ourselves and our language.

Upcoming webinars:

- Alice Henderson, /Learning to listen: Coping with spoken variation in the workplace/ (Monday, April 28, 2025)

- Ana Tankosic, /Intersectionality in translingual spaces: Migrant experiences from ‘down-under’/ (Monday, May 12, 2025)

- Giuliana Regnoli, /Unveiling linguistic bias: Approaches to accent perception and discrimination/ (Monday, May 26, 2025)

The seminar is free of charge, but participants must register. To access this and next events, you should create an account on theH2IOSC Training Environment https://h2iosc-training-platform.ilc4clarin.ilc.cnr.it/registration. Once logged in with your credentials, choose the course “Language and Accent Discrimination - Online Seminar Series” and activate it with the code PbK837GtE. Make sure to have the Teams platform installed.

The registrations of the previous CIRCE Seminars are also available on the H2IOSC Training Environment https://h2iosc-training-platform.ilc4clarin.ilc.cnr.it/. For any inquiry, write to contact@circe-project.eu <mailto: contact@circe-project.eu>.