Using AI to track how Northern English dialects are changing

Posted on Monday 15 December 2025

Dr George Bailey from the Department of Language and Linguistic Science recently delivered an invited talk at the English and Media Centre's emagazine conference, speaking to over 850 English Language A-level students about cutting-edge research into regional dialects.

In his presentation, 'Dialects and machines: Using technology to classify regional variation', Dr Bailey demonstrated how techniques in artificial intelligence and machine learning can be used to study dialect change. Drawing on a large dataset from the Our Dialects project, he explained how computational models can predict where someone is from in the North of England based on their dialect, allowing researchers to quantify the degree of mutual confusability between dialects and track dialect levelling over time.

This was Dr Bailey's second invited talk at the conference, having previously presented in 2021. The emagazine conference brings together students, teachers, and researchers to explore contemporary issues in English Language studies.

"It was a real pleasure to present some of my ongoing research into dialect levelling to such a large and enthusiastic crowd of students," said Dr Bailey. "Events like these are so important for bringing contemporary linguistic research into the English Language A-level classroom. These are the next generation of linguists, so it was great to show how contemporary methods from data science and artificial intelligence can be used to gain new insight into patterns of dialect change."

Find out more about Dr Bailey's research: https://www.york.ac.uk/language/people/academic-research/george-bailey/