Nicole Rosen

My research interests centre primarily around effects of language contact and interaction, especially the language situation on the Canadian Prairies. My doctoral thesis was a study of Michif, a Cree-French mixed language spoken primarily in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, and in 2007 I began work with Michif speakers to develop an online audio Michif-English dictionary, funded by a SSHRC Aboriginal Research Grant. Since then I have expanded my research to include the study of Prairies French and English.

I am interested in French in minority situations in Western Canada, and have done work comparing Métis and non-Métis varieties of French.

I began work studying English dialect differences in Southern Alberta in 2008 with the goal of this research to build a Southern Alberta Corpus of English (SACE) to begin the investigation of social and linguistic factors involved in language variation between rural and urban speakers as well as variation between speakers of different religious backgrounds. Since moving to the University of Manitoba, I have expanded this project to include speakers from Manitoba. We have now collected and are analyzing data from the Steinbach, Winkler, Interlake and Winnipeg areas from a variety of ethnic backgrounds important on the Prairies including Ukrainian, Mennonite, Filipino and Icelandic. I have been interested in how language transfer effects may develop into ethnolinguistic identity markers, and settlement patterns and non-Anglophone immigration has influenced English in the Prairies, especially in sociophonetic variation and change. More recently, I am interested in how social meaning plays out in Manitoba.