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Peter Trudgill | |
|---|---|
| Born | (1943-11-07)7 November 1943 (age 82) Norwich |
| Academic background | |
| Education | City of Norwich School |
| Alma mater | |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | sociolinguistics |
| Institutions | |
Peter TrudgillFBA (/ˈtrʌdɡɪl/TRUD-gil; born 7 November 1943) is an Englishsociolinguist, academic and author.
Trudgill was born inNorwich, England, and grew up in the area ofThorpe St Andrew.[1] He attended theCity of Norwich School from 1955. Trudgill studiedmodern languages atKing's College, Cambridge and obtained a PhD[2] from theUniversity of Edinburgh in 1971.
Before becoming professor ofsociolinguistics at theUniversity of Essex he taught in the Department of Linguistic Science at theUniversity of Reading from 1970 to 1986. He was professor of English language andlinguistics at theUniversity of Lausanne, Switzerland, from 1993 to 1998, and then at theUniversity 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 theUniversity of East Anglia, in Norwich, England. On 2 June 1995 he received anhonorary doctorate from the Faculty of Humanities atUppsala University,Sweden.[3] He also has honorary doctorates fromUEA;La Trobe University, Melbourne; theUniversity of Patras, Greece; theUniversity of Murcia, Spain; the University of Lublin, Poland; and theUniversity of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.
He has carried out linguistic fieldwork inBritain,Greece andNorway, and has lectured in mostEuropean countries,Canada, theUnited States,Colombia,Australia,New Zealand,India,Thailand,Hong Kong,Fiji,Malawi andJapan. Peter Trudgill has been the president of the Friends ofNorfolk Dialect society since its inception in 1999.[4] and contributes a regular column on language and languages in Europe toThe New European newspaper.
Trudgill is one of the first to applyLaboviansociolinguistic methodology in the UK,[5][6] and to provide a framework for studying dialect contact phenomena.[7]
He has carried out studies onrhoticity 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.[8][9] He was a member of the committee for England and Wales for theAtlas Linguarum Europae in the 1970s, doing some research on the East Anglian sites.[10]
He is a member of theNorwegian Academy of Science and Letters,[11] 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.[12] At the end of 2017, he signed theDeclaration on the Common Language of theCroats,Serbs,Bosniaks andMontenegrins.[13]
His works include:
sociolinguist Peter Trudgill noted as long ago as the 1970s that language use had begun to change, and to some extent to level out, in smaller towns due to the undue influence of larger, more culturally dominant cities... The urge to devalue regional accents is part of a deliberate process.
