Biography

Erin McInerney is a Ph.D. student in sociolinguistics studying the interplay of language and social media. She is particularly interested in how multilingual repertoires and ‘the multilingual self’ can be commodified on the social media platform Instagram. Her current research centres on language use at the Café de Flore Instagram geotag, from which she is building a new corpus of Instagram data for linguists and scholars in the digital humanities. You can view her participants’ contributions on Instagram by searching @CorpusdeFlore. 

Erin has also undertaken research on multilingualism in special populations. Her work has centred most frequently on bilingual individuals diagnosed with Trisomy 21.  Representing the University of Fribourg, Erin is a contributor to the Erasmus+ project Capito! Compris! Understood! Understood!, a two year, trans-national assignment that unites scholars from Italy, Austria, Ireland and Switzerland. The project applies previous research in linguistics to the development of new linguistic guidelines for easy-to-understand language in French, German, English and Italian. Collaboratively, the project strives to bring greater accessibility to language by highlighting the diverse range of speakers and speakerness that exist within any language system.