Rap, Rhythm and Rhoticity: Two Wins at ICAME 47
At the 47th ICAME conference in Koblenz (26–30 May 2026), themed A Confluence of Corpus Research in the Age of AI, two early-career researchers took home the event’s top prizes — one analysing rap, the other media speech.
Best Poster — Stig Johansson Bursary: Xingni Li (University of Oxford) compared speech prosody and rap flows in American English and Cantonese, showing that the languages’ clear rhythmic differences in ordinary speech largely vanish in rap — and that Cantonese rap appears to move toward the conventions of American English rap.
Best Paper — John Sinclair Bursary: Cheryl Yeo (Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich) used a corpus of media speech to study rhoticity — the variable “r” — in Singapore English, finding it present but uneven across ethnic groups, and shifting toward non-rhotic when speakers adopt a more local orientation.
Both bursaries, named after pioneers of corpus linguistics, carry a cash prize. Warmest congratulations to both winners — richly deserved.