Peter Trudgill

Peter Trudgill, ( ; born 7 November 1943) is an English sociolinguist, academic and author.

Biography

Trudgill was born in Norwich, England, and grew up in the area of Thorpe St Andrew. He attended the City of Norwich School from 1955. Trudgill studied modern languages at King's College, Cambridge and obtained a PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 1971.

Before becoming professor of sociolinguistics at the University of Essex he taught in the Department of Linguistic Science at the University of Reading from 1970 to 1986. He was professor of English language and linguistics at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, from 1993 to 1998, and then at the University of Fribourg, also in Switzerland, from which he retired in September 2005, and where he is now professor emeritus of English Linguistics.

He is an honorary Professor of Sociolinguistics at the University of East Anglia, in Norwich, England. On 2 June 1995 he received an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Humanities at Uppsala University, Sweden. He also has honorary doctorates from UEA; La Trobe University, Melbourne; the University of Patras, Greece; the University of Murcia, Spain; the University of Lublin, Poland; and the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.

He has carried out linguistic fieldwork in Britain, Greece and Norway, and has lectured in most European countries, Canada, the United States, Colombia, Australia, New Zealand, India, Thailand, Hong Kong, Fiji, Malawi and Japan. Peter Trudgill has been the president of the Friends of Norfolk Dialect society since its inception in 1999. and contributes a regular column on language and languages in Europe to The New European newspaper.

Trudgill is one of the first to apply Labovian sociolinguistic methodology in the UK, and to provide a framework for studying dialect contact phenomena.

He has carried out studies on rhoticity in English and tracked trends in British rock music for decades, including the Beatles' decreased pronunciation of /r/s over the course of the 1960s. He was a member of the committee for England and Wales for the Atlas Linguarum Europae in the 1970s, doing some research on the East Anglian sites.

Trudgill is also the author of Chapter 1 ("The Meanings of Words Should Not be Allowed to Vary or Change") of the popular linguistics book "Language Myths" that he co-edited.

He is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, and a Fellow of the British Academy.

Since February 2017, Trudgill has written weekly columns relating to European languages in the weekly newspaper The New European. At the end of 2017, he signed the Declaration on the Common Language of the Croats, Serbs, Bosniaks and Montenegrins.

Bibliography

His works include:

* 1974 ''The Social Differentiation of English in Norwich'' (based on his PhD thesis)
* 1974 ''Sociolinguistics: An Introduction to Language and Society''
* 1976 ''Introduction to Sociolinguistics''
* 1975 ''Accent, Dialect and the School''
* 1979 ''English Accents and Dialects'' (with Arthur Hughes)
* 1980 ''Dialectology'' (with J. K. Chambers)
* 1982 ''International English'' (with Jean Hannah)
* 1982 ''Coping With America'' (Blackwell, 2nd edition, 1986)
* 1983 ''On Dialect: Social and Geographical Perspectives''
* 1984 ''Language in the British Isles''
* 1984 ''Applied Sociolinguistics''
* 1986 ''Dialects in Contact''
* 1990 ''The Dialects of England''
* 1990 ''Bad Language'' (with Lars Andersson)
* 1992 ''Introducing Language and Society''
* 1998 ''Language Myths'' (with Laurie Bauer)
* 2001 ''Alternative Histories of English'' (with Richard J. Watts)
* 2002 ''Sociolinguistic Variation and Change''
* 2003 ''A Glossary of Sociolinguistics''
* 2003 ''Norfolk Origins 7: The Norfolk Dialect''
* 2004 ''New-Dialect Formation: The Inevitability of Colonial Englishes''
* 2004 ''New Zealand English: Its Origins and Evolution'' (with et al. Elizabeth Gordon, Lyle Campbell, Margaret Maclagan, Andrea Sudbury, Jennifer Hay)
* 2008 ''In Sfakia: passing time in the wilds of Crete''
* 2010 ''The Lesser-Known Varieties of English: An Introduction'' (with Daniel Schreier, Edgar W. Schneider)
* 2011 ''Sociolinguistic Typology: Social Determinants of Linguistic Complexity'' Oxford University Press
* 2016 ''Dialect matters: respecting vernacular language.'' Cambridge University Press
* 2018 ''Norwegian as a normal language and other studies in Scandinavian linguistics.'' Novus: Oslo
* 2023 ''The Long Journey of English: A Geographical History of the Language.'' Cambridge University Press

References

External links

Interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 20 November 2012 (video)

{{DEFAULTSORT:Trudgill, Peter
1943 births
Dialectologists
Living people
Linguists from the United Kingdom
Linguists of English
Sociolinguists
Academics from Norwich
Alumni of King's College, Cambridge
Alumni of the University of Edinburgh
Academics of the University of East Anglia
Academics of the University of Essex
Fellows of the British Academy
People educated at the City of Norwich School
Academic staff of the University of Lausanne
Academic staff of the University of Fribourg
Members of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters
Signatories of the Declaration on the Common Language