Allan Bell (sociolinguist)

Education and early career

Bell received a PhD scholarship from the University of Auckland in 1970. Bell went to London, England and began attending and auditing courses that were being taught by well-known London linguists, including Randolph Quirk, Ruth Kempson, Neil Smith, Dick Hudson, and Bill Downs.

With Bill Labov serving as the external examiner for his PhD dissertation, Bell modeled his research in a similar manner that Labov had done by looking at the similarities and differences of different radio stations through varying social class audiences. Bell alluded in his dissertation that he applied VSLX methods to the study of newspaper language: "And I remember writing you know from New Zealand such a distant star in the Linguistic universe. Transformational grammar said, 'you can't do this kind of work' you know studying news language to see how style works. You know there's no way to do this. It varies. We don't do 'vary.' Well, I discovered that there were these people who had started to study variation and that made possible what I did."

Bell's dissertation took three radio stations in New Zealand, each one coming from the same studio, in order to tackle certain linguistic variables: consonant cluster simplification; the voicing of intervocalic t; negative contraction, auxiliary contraction, and specific determiner deletion. Through the use of VSLX techniques, Bell was able to uncover numerous differences amongst the radio stations. Bell led an audience survey, which uncovered that different sections and communities of the New Zealand population were being targeted in different manners by the radio stations. This led Bell to conclude that people will shift their styles based on who the audience they are targeting is. This idea led Bell to develop the theory of audience design, a theory that landed a prominent place within the field of sociolinguistics.

While also doing work within the field of sociolinguistics, Bell has worked as a journalist and editor for several news outlets, including daily news services, weekly newspapers, and monthly magazines. Bell was an Honorary Research Fellow at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand.

Bell's notable students include Ineke Crezee, who completed her doctorate at Auckland University of Technology in 2008, supervised by Bell and Koenraad Kuiper.