Contact

About

James is a sociophonetician interested in how social factors play a role in phonetic variation and change over time. Using a combination of empirical sociolinguistic, corpus-based, and computational methods, he investigates vowel shifts, and how speakers from various social backgrounds respond to, participate in, and drive changes forward. His research focuses primarily on English and English-based varieties in the Pacific, especially the Englishes of Australia, New Zealand, California, Hawaiʻi, as well as Hawaiʻi Creole and Bislama.

Qualifications

• 2008 - B.A. Linguistics: University of California, Santa Barbara
• 2013 - M.A. Linguistics: University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
• 2015 - Ph.D. Linguistics: University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa

Previous Positions

• 2015-2016: Adjunct Instructor, Santa Monica College
• 2017-2020: Postdoctoral Fellow, Sydney Speaks, ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, Australian National University

Research Interests

• Sociophonetics
• Language variation and change
• Vowel variation and acoustics
• Structural variation in Pacific Englishes, creoles and contact varieties
• Perceptual dialectology
• Language change across the lifespan
• Optimizing sociolinguistic methodologies (esp. forced alignment)

Recent Publications

Please visit James' website for his full CV.

Barth, Danielle, James Grama, Simon Gonzalez, & Catherine E. Travis. 2020. Using forced alignment for sociophonetic research on a minority language. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics, 25(2): 1–10.

Grama, James & Robert Kennedy. Dimensions of variance and contrast in the low-back merger and Low-Back Merger Shift. In Kara Becker (ed.), The Low-Back-Merger Shift: Uniting the Canadian Vowel Shift, the California Vowel Shift, and short front vowel shifts across North America. Publications of the American Dialect Society, 104(1): 31–55.

Grama, James, Catherine E. Travis, & Simon Gonzalez. 2019. Initiation, progression, and conditioning of the short-front vowel shift in Australia. In Sasha Calhoun, Paola Escudero, Marija Tabain & Paul Warren (eds.), Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Melbourne, Australia 2019, 1769-1773.

Gonzalez, Simon, Catherine E. Travis, James Grama, Danielle Barth & Sunkulp Ananthanarayan. 2018. Recursive forced-alignment: A test on a minority language. In Julien Epps, Joe Wolfe, John Smith, and Caroline Jones (eds.), Proceedings of the Seventeenth Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology, 145–148.