Position: Research Officer in Linguistics (German)

Email: f.breit@bangor.ac.uk

Phone: +44 (0)1248 388230

Location: 37-41 College Road

  • PhD: Linguistics
    University College London, 2019
  • MA: Linguistics with specialisation in Phonology
    University College London, 2014
  • BA: Linguistics
    2012

2024

2023

  • PublishedElements, Government and Licensing: Developments in phonology
    Breit, F. (Editor), Yoshida, Y. (Editor) & Youngberg, C. (Editor), Aug 2023, London: UCL Press.
    Research output: Book/Report › Book › peer-review
  • PublishedL’ART Research Assistant
    Breit, F. (Developer), Tamburelli, M. (Developer) & Gruffydd, I. (Other), 3 May 2023
    Research output: Non-textual form › Software
  • PublishedMelody and segmental representation: a brief introduction
    Breit, F., 14 Aug 2023, Elements, Government and Licensing: Developments in phonology. Breit, F., Yoshida, Y. & Youngberg, C. (eds.). UCL Press
    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter › peer-review
  • PublishedPrimitives of Phonological Structure
    Breit, F. (Editor), Botma, B. (Editor), van 't Veer, M. (Editor) & van Oostendorp, M. (Editor), 9 Jun 2023, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 400 p. (Oxford Studies in Phonology and Phonetics)
    Research output: Book/Report › Book › peer-review
  • PublishedPrinciples and parameters in phonology: an introduction and overview
    Youngberg, C., Yoshida, Y. & Breit, F., 14 Aug 2023, Elements, Government and Licensing: Developments in phonology. Breit, F., Yoshida, Y. & Youngberg, C. (eds.). UCL Press
    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter › peer-review
  • PublishedProsodic structure and recursion: a brief introduction
    Youngberg, C. & Breit, F., 14 Aug 2023, Elements, Government and Licensing: Developments in phonology. Breit, F., Yoshida, Y. & Youngberg, C. (eds.). London: UCL Press
    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter › peer-review
  • PublishedSets of (sets of) elements
    Breit, F., 14 Aug 2023, Elements, Government and Licensing: Developments in phonology. Breit, F., Yoshida, Y. & Youngberg, C. (eds.). London: UCL Press
    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter › peer-review
  • UnpublishedThe L' ART Research Assistant: A digital toolkit for bilingualism and language attitude research
    Breit, F., Tamburelli, M., Gruffydd, I. & Brasca, L., 4 May 2023, (Unpublished).
    Research output: Working paper
  • PublishedThe structure and content of phonological primitives
    van 't Veer, M., Botma, B., Breit, F. & van Oostendorp, M., 9 Jun 2023, Primitives of Phonological Structure. Breit, F., Botma, B., van 't Veer, M. & van Oostendorp, M. (eds.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 1-36 (Oxford Studies in Phonology and Phonetics).
    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter › peer-review

2020

2017

2014

2013

2012

2024

  • The interaction of policy, attitudes, and vitality: evidence from three bilingual communities

    Paper presented at the International Congress of Linguists 2024 in Poznań:

    Active language policy and the fostering or maintenance of positive attitudes are fundamental

    components in the prevention of language shift (e.g. Fishman, 1990). This, together with recent

    methodological developments in sociolinguistics (Kircher & Zipp, 2022) calls for a more holistic approach to the measurement of language attitudes and their relationship with exposure levels. In this paper, we present three large studies investigating the relationship between early exposure, language attitudes, and different bilingual language policies in three European communities where a minority/endangered language co‐exists with a sociolinguistically dominant language.

    The bilingual communities under investigation are Lombard‐Italian in Italy, Moselle Franconian‐German in Belgium, and Welsh‐English in Wales, exemplifying fundamentally different types of language policy as well as systematic variation in both opportunities for and amount of early exposure. The Welsh language receives full socio‐political recognition, and there exist ample opportunities for people to be exposed to Welsh either in the family or broader community. Lombard, on the other hand, is in a situation of benign neglect, not benefitting from any active policy and with rather scarce opportunities for exposure except for those who grow up in a predominantly Lombard‐speaking family. Moselle Franconian is somewhat in between: while not officially recognised, its speakers are considered a German‐speaking minority. Importantly, however, due to a situation of diglossia (Ferguson, 1959), it is

    Moselle‐Franconian – rather than German – that is regularly spoken in daily communication, hence providing ample opportunities for early exposure.

    To investigate the relationship between these different sociolinguistic situations and the effect they may have on speakers’ attitudes, we collected data from 338 participants aged between 24‐36 years, employing three different methodologies that varied in degree of explicitness: the Attitudes towards Languages Questionnaire (Schoel et al., 2012), the Matched Guise Technique (Lambert et al., 1960), and the Implicit Association Test (Greenwald et al., 1998).

    Data from each method will be investigated in relation to several indicators of early exposure

    collected through a linguistic background questionnaire, as well as to extralinguistic variables – notably gender – while attitude dimensions such as status and solidarity will also be explored.

    Preliminary results suggest potential links between bilingual language policy and speakers’

    attitudes, with possible interactions between types of exposure and some of the attitude scores. This research can provide insight into how different policies may affect language attitudes, and the role of early exposure as potential mediator.

    8 Sep 2024

    Activity: Oral presentation (Speaker)
  • The interaction of policy, attitudes, and vitality: evidence from three bilingual communities

    Invited talk presented at the UCL Linguistics Seminar

    6 Sep 2024

    Activity: Invited talk (Invited speaker)
  • Investigating the relationship between early exposure and explicit and implicit attitudes towards Welsh and English

    This paper explored the relationship between early language exposure and the language attitudes of Welsh-English speakers in north-west Wales.

    Our findings indicate the importance of early language exposure in forming implicit attitudes, which suggests that increased means of exposure, particularly beyond educational contexts, should receive more attention in Welsh language policy and planning, and more generally in minority language situations where a good level of educations use has been established.

    12 Jul 2024

    Links:

    Activity: Oral presentation (Speaker)
  • Measuring and modelling language attitudes: Comparisons across two bilingual communities

    Speakers’ attitudes are considered a fundamental barometer for the vitality of a language (e.g., UNESCO, 2003). This, together with findings that implicit attitudes are generally stronger predictors of habitual and spontaneous behaviour (e.g., Perugini, 2005), raises two core questions: (1) which types

    of attitudes and thus which attitude measurements are better predictors of language usage? (2) to what extent do different language policies feed different types of speakers’ attitudes? We explored these questions by measuring rates of spontaneous language usage and comparing them with attitudinal results from two methods that vary in degrees of implicitness: the Matched Guise Technique (Lambert et al., 1960) and the Implicit Association Test (Greenwald, McGhee & Schwartz, 1998) across two bilingual communities whose regional/minority languages receive radically different degrees of sociopolitical recognition: Lombard–Italian (Italy) and Welsh–English (UK). Results from 163 participants

    aged between 24–36 years show that usage rates correlate with MGT status scores for Lombard but not for Welsh. The reverse holds for IAT scores, correlating with usage rates for Welsh but not Lombard.

    We propose that these findings can be understood in view of the different socio-political support associated with the two languages: while strong support for Welsh led to its use becoming habitual and thus able to be captured by implicit attitude measurements, the use of Lombard has been discouraged for decades, and therefore younger speakers who choose to use it are making a more deliberate, conscious decision, resulting in behaviour that corelates with the less implicit measurements of the MGT. These results have important implications for the study of language attitudes, particularly for the measurement of attitudes as a proxy for language vitality. Specifically, they suggest that the degree to which an attitudinal measurement can predict linguistic behaviour depends partly on the social and political circumstances of the language at issue.

    12 Jun 2024 – 16 Jun 2024

    Links:

    Activity: Oral presentation (Speaker)
  • Attitude asymmetry in bilingual communities reflects differences in socio-political recognition between majority and minority/endangered languages: Evidence from three European communities.

    Paper presented at VALS-ASLA 2024:

    Asymmetries and inequalities between major languages and regional/minority/endangered languages are often reflected in – as well as a consequence of – language policy and the linguistic attitudes held by speakers of those languages (e.g., Fishman, 1991; Trudgill, 1992; UNESCO, 2003). In this paper, we present two large studies investigating the relationship between language attitudes and different levels of socio-political recognition in three European communities where a minority/endangered language co-exists in an asymmetric relationship with a sociolinguistically dominant language.

    The communities under investigation are Lombard-Italian speakers in Italy, Moselle Franconian-German speakers in Belgium, and Welsh-English speakers in Wales. These communities are markedly different in terms of their language policies and the degrees of socio-political recognition of their minority/endangered language. In Wales, the Welsh language enjoys full socio-political recognition and strong public support (e.g. Baker, 2003); in the Eifel region of Belgium, while Moselle Franconian does not enjoy direct recognition, its speakers are a recognised linguistic minority, albeit it as German speaking, with Moselle-Franconian indirectly supported as a closely-related variety of German (Möller, 2017); meanwhile, despite a mention in a regional law, Lombard does not feature among the languages that the Italian government deems worthy of protection, and as such does not benefit from any active policy (Coluzzi, 2007; Coluzzi et al., 2018).

    To investigate the potential inequalities that emerge from the different socio-political situations across the three bilingual communities, we collected data from a total of 235 participants aged between 24-36 years employing two different methodologies. This resulted in the collection of attitudinal measurements that varied in degree of explicitness: the Attitudes Towards Language Questionnaire (AToL, Schoel et al., 2013) measured explicit/overt language attitudes, while an adaptation of the Matched Guise Technique (MGT, Lambert, Gardner and Fillenbaum, 1960) measured less overt and more indirect attitudes towards the communities’ languages via the speaker-evaluation paradigm.

    Results from the AToL suggest a link between degree of socio-political recognition and overall overt attitude, with Welsh scoring higher than both Moselle Franconian and Lombard, and Moselle-Franconian scoring higher than Lombard.

    The link between degree of socio-political recognition and attitudes is further supported by the MGT results, where an interaction between community and attitude score suggests that the attitudes held towards each language type (i.e., majority language vs minority language) depend on the community, with Wales and Belgium scoring the minority/endangered language more positively than the majority language, while Lombardy shows the opposite trend.

    Analyses of the solidarity and status components of the MGT show that consistent language policy (e.g., in Wales) is strongly reflected in speakers’ attitudes, while the type of “benign neglect” (e.g., Fishman, 2004: 115) we see in Lombardy tends to continually encourage negative attitudes towards the endangered language, perpetuating asymmetries and possibly accelerating endangerment.

    12 Feb 2024 – 13 Feb 2024

    Activity: Oral presentation (Speaker)

2023

  • Toward a metric estimating the impact of initial consonant mutation on neutralisation and contrastivity: a Welsh case study

    Paper presented at the 2023 Western Conference on Linguistics: Initial syllable faithfulness is a well-established and strong bias against alternations affecting the left edge of the word (e.g. Trubetzkoy 1939, Steriade 1994, Beckman 1998, Casali 1998, Alber 2001, Smith 2002, Barnes 2002, Becker et al. 2012). This is reflected in the disproportionally important role word onsets play in word recognition (Beckman 1998, Smith 2002). As Smith (2002) argues, such initial alternations must, if anything, improve recognisability, e.g. by increasing prominence for the parser.

    11 Nov 2023

    Links:

    Activity: Oral presentation (Speaker)
  • Pushing boundaries in the measurement of language attitudes: Combining new technology and standardising practice

    Paper presented at Linguistics Beyond and Within 2023:

    Speakers’ attitudes are considered a fundamental barometer for the current and future vitality of a language, with recent work emphasising the importance of methodological developments (Kircher & Zipp, 2022). This, together with the growing concern surrounding the replicability of results across the social sciences, including in linguistics (Grieve, 2021), calls for urgent developments in research practices, including the adoption of more consistent and comparable implementations of method. In this paper, we present a series of studies conducted using a newly developed digital application for the collection, storage and transfer of data for research in multilingualism and language attitudes, specifically designed for research in bilingual populations who speak a majority language and a regional/minority/heritage language. This application offers the fundamental benefit of enhancing consistency and comparability within and across studies, which also improves reproducibility, for example by ensuring that presentation of stimuli for a speaker evaluation paradigm (Lambert et al., 1960) is more strictly controlled both across participants and across studies. As the source code is publicly available and version-controlled, other researchers can easily view and reconstruct tasks exactly as they were administered. The application was recently employed across three European communities whose regional/minority languages receive radically different degrees of socio-political recognition: Lombard (Italy), Moselle Franconian (Belgium), and Welsh (UK).Our results reveal fundamental differences in attitude scores depending on measurement type (questionnaire vs. speaker evaluation paradigm). Besides reinforcing the view that different measurements are likely to tap on different attitudinal constructs (e.g., Pantos, 2019), these results also suggest that different measurement methods may gather data on different attitude objects. We argue that this highlights a need for a more holistic approach to the measurement of language attitudes, where a battery of tests – as opposed to a single measure – should become the norm, as it has done in other research areas.

    13 Oct 2023

    Links:

    Activity: Oral presentation (Speaker)
  • A matter of strength: Language policy, attitudes, and linguistic dominance in three bilingual communities

    Paper presented at the 4th International Conference on Multilingualism and Multilingual Education

    12 Oct 2023

    Links:

    Activity: Oral presentation (Speaker)
  • New developments in documenting attitudes in minority and heritage language situations: an Italian case-study

    Paper presented at Documenting languages, Documenting Cultures 2023. The conference focuses on the topic of language documentation from the various perspectives offered by different ‘minority’ situations (migrant languages, minority languages, dialects). Its aim is to provide an interdisciplinary look at a topic which is today the focus of renewed interest, both in epistemological and theoretical terms.

    6 Oct 2023

    Links:

    Activity: Oral presentation (Speaker)
  • What do you really think about Welsh?

    Public outreach presentation at the Llŷn and Eifionydd National Eisteddfod 2023

    12 Aug 2023

    Activity: Types of Public engagement and outreach - Festival/Exhibition (Speaker)
  • Eastern Generative Grammar Summer School

    Taught an advanced course on the Morphosyntax-Phonology Interface and an Introduction to Melodic Representation.

    24 Jul 2023 – 5 Aug 2023

    Activity: Participation in Academic workshop, seminar, course (Invited speaker)
  • New avenues in collecting attitudinal data on regional/minority languages: the case of Welsh

    Paper presented at the Welsh Linguistics Seminar

    27 Jun 2023

    Activity: Invited talk (Speaker)
  • Quantity in North Welsh disyllables: Between Phonology and Phonetics

    Paper presented at Approaches to Phonology and Phonetics

    24 Jun 2023

    Activity: Oral presentation (Speaker)

2021

2019

2018