Yolandi Ribbens-Klein
About
I am a sociolinguist originally from Cape Town, South Africa. My research delves into the intersection of English phonetic variation and the embodied performances of identities, ideologies, and senses of place and belonging in multilingual societies. I previously taught linguistic courses at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels at the University of Cape Town, the University of Duisburg-Essen, and Stellenbosch University.
I hold a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Cape Town, where I worked under the guidance of Prof. Rajend Mesthrie and Prof. Ana Deumert. My first post-doctoral position was within Prof. Mesthrie’s South African Research Chair Initiative (SARChI) project “Language, Migration and Social Change.” In 2018, I joined Prof. Isabelle Buchstaller’s Sociolinguistics Lab at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany, where I worked as a postdoctoral researcher along with Dr Teresa Pratt. Our joint project focused on language variation across the lifespan of speakers living in Newcastle, UK.
I returned to Cape Town shortly before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, continuing my work as a postdoctoral research fellow and research officer, specialising in English sociophonetics, within Prof. Mesthrie’s SARChI project. Following these postdoctoral positions, I expanded my professional expertise by enrolling in an undergraduate speech-language pathology program at the University of Cape Town for a year and a half.
In August 2024, I joined NTNU’s Department of Language and Literature as an Associate Professor of English Sociolinguistics.
Research
I enjoyed being part of various local and international research projects.
At the University of Cape Town (UCT), I was part of Prof. Mesthrie’s SARChI Language, Migration and Change project. I have also worked closely with Prof. Ana Deumert since the start of my postgraduate studies at UCT as a research assistant and junior researcher for her research projects on multilingual online communication in South Africa, together with researchers from the University of the Western Cape.
With my postdoctoral position at the University of Duisburg-Essen (UDE), I was involved in the establishment of Prof. Isabelle Buchstaller’s Sociolinguistics Lab, where we had regular events involving staff in the department, as well as undergraduate and postgraduate students. Our UDE SocioLab also initiated a lecture series with invited speakers, collaborating with Prof. Aria Adli from the University of Cologne. During my time at UDE, I was also involved in the Sociolinguistics of Belonging workshop events organised at the Meertens Instituut by Prof. Leonie Cornips (chair of Language Culture in Limburg, Maastricht University) and Prof. Vincent de Rooij (University of Amsterdam).
In 2019, I became involved as a part-time research assistant with an interdisciplinary team based at the University of Michigan, under the guidance of Prof. Andries Coetzee. The project, From Africa to Patagonia: Voices of Displacement, focuses on the linguistic and cultural practices of a unique Afrikaans expatriate community in Patagonia, Argentina. Prof. Coetzee and I are currently working on a paper emanating from the project that concerns /ɛ/-lowering in Afrikaans.
Through Prof. Deumert, I also got the opportunity to be involved in the International Partnerships for Excellent Education, Research and Innovation (INTPART) network project, which funds collaborations between the Center for Multilingualism in Society across the Lifespan (MultiLing; University of Oslo) and South African universities. During my time as a visiting scholar at MultiLing in 2017, I established connections with Prof. Unn Røyneland and Prof. Bente Ailin Svendsen. For instance, I was invited to be part of Prof. Ailin Svendsen’s panel Contemporary Urban Speech Styles across Space and Time: Social Meanings, Power and Contestations of Language at the International Conference on Sociolinguistics (ICS-2; Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest; 6-8 September 2018). Thus, I not only fostered solid scholarly networks with Norwegian linguistics, but I also learned about the dynamic role of English in Norwegian society, especially the impact of multilingualism and diversity on youth languages.
Lastly, I provided research assistance for an interdisciplinary research project led by Prof. Heather Brookes (then UCT, currently Stellenbosch University) that developed Communicative Development Inventories (CDI) for five Southern African languages (the SA-CDI project). For this project, I created Microsoft Access databases from scratch to capture questionnaire results of children’s vocabulary in five languages used in Southern Africa, and trained students in using the databases. Additionally, this project strengthened my networks with researchers and students at other South African universities, as well as researchers at the University of Botswana. This project also introduced me to colleagues working in Speech-Language Pathology.
Publications
Research output based on my PhD comprises one published book chapter, one published research article in an academic journal, and four research articles in progress.
My chapter on Afrikaans sociolinguistics in the twenty-first century will be published in 2024 in the book Contemporary Afrikaans Linguistics. In 2023, our chapter on sociolinguistics in South Africa (co-author, Prof. Mesthrie) was published in The Routledge Handbook of Sociolinguistics around the World. This year also saw the publication of our team of sociolinguistics at the University of Cape Town’s research in The Routledge Handbook of Sociophonetics with a chapter entitled “Sociophonetics and South African studies: Focus on ethnicity” (with Prof. Mesthrie, Dr Chevalier, Dr Toefy, and Dr Wileman). These publications focus on the sociophonetics of South African Englishes and sociolinguistic research in South Africa.
I particularly enjoyed being involved in a publication on varieties of South African English for The Oxford Handbook of Speech Development in Languages of the World, which is co-authored with two academics from the University of Cape Town’s Communication Sciences & Disorders Division (Dr Pascoe and Ms Mahura, Faculty of Health Sciences).
Teaching
Courses
My teaching experience ranges from formal linguistics to sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, and linguistic anthropology.
At both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, I taught theoretical foundations and applications, as well as qualitative and quantitative research methods with practical components.
The practical aspects of my teaching involve training students how to use different software applications for data collection, data management, and data analysis. For example, I taught students how to use the qualitative data analysis program MAXQDA to collect and analyse a range of qualitative data (interviews, documents, linguistic landscape data, and social media data). I also trained students in video and audio transcription, mainly using ELAN. Furthermore, as part of the phonetics and sociophonetics courses I taught, students learned how to use Praat for acoustic analyses. I can also teach descriptive and inferential statistics for linguistic data analysis using R.