Dr Damien Mooney

Dr Damien Mooney's published research focuses on contact induced transfer in bilingual speech, language death theory, and on the role of language and dialect contact in the loss or retention of pronunciation and grammatical features in regional varieties of French and the regional languages of France.

Dr Mooney's D.Phil thesis (Oxford, 2014) entitled 'Linguistic transfer and dialect levelling: a sociophonetic analysis of contact in the regional French of Béarn' investigates the genesis and evolution of the regional variety of French spoken in Béarn, southwestern France. This research appeared in 2016 as a monograph entitled Southern Regional French: A Linguistic Analysis of Language and Dialect Contact (Oxford: Legenda).

His second research project, funded by the British Academy (2016-18) examines linguistic variation and change in Béarnais (Gascon), a localised variety of langue d'oc spoken in southwestern France, focusing on the interplay between the linguistic and social processes that lead to language and dialect death as Béarnais contracts under pressure from the national language, French, and the standardised langue d'oc variety, Occitan. 

Dr Mooney's current research project, also funded by the British Academy, investigates the participation of sexual minorities in language change. This study examines the extent to which self-identified queer men and women in Paris participate in an ongoing sound change which involves a counter-clockwise rotation of the French nasal vowel system.