This post is part of our Research Initiation Scheme for 2024-2025 

I recently had the pleasure of meeting with Dr Emma Humphries to find out more about her academic career and current areas of interest. 

Currently a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow in the School of Arts, English and Languages at QUB, Emma began her academic career in Nottingham, where she studied French and Spanish at undergraduate level. Her love for the French language was piqued during her dissertation project relating to public reaction towards the long-awaited feminisation of professional titles in the 1990s. With support from her mentors, this love of French soon prompted Emma to embark on an MRes project examining prescriptivism on social media. 

What is prescriptivism you might ask? Simply put, this is when someone corrects and critiques someone else’s use of language – whether in oral or written format. Emma has found that people can feel very strongly about the ‘correct’ use of language, suggesting that language is an intrinsic part of one’s identity and culture. Prescriptivism thus became the main focus of her academic career, with her PhD exploring language columns in the late 1800s in France in comparison to similar online sources. Interestingly, these publications were formatted much like a column in local newspapers so that members of the public could write to the author with specific language queries (i.e. how to spell/pronounce/use certain language) that would be addressed in the bi-weekly publication. 

In a contemporary context, Emma places great emphasis on the influence of social media and how this has impacted the use of language – she stresses that with the advent of comment sections, we now have large bodies of empirical evidence of prescriptivism, data which we did not have access to before. This renders the study of prescriptivism more quantifiable and therefore feasible, allowing researchers such as Emma to truly shine a light on this phenomenon. 

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