Suzanne Romaine (born 1951) is an American linguist known for work onhistorical linguistics andsociolinguistics. From 1984 to 2014 she wasMerton Professor ofEnglish language at theUniversity of Oxford.^[1]

Romaine was born inMassachusetts in 1951, and received an A.B.magna cum laude in German & Linguistics in 1973 fromBryn Mawr College; she then received a master's degree in Phonetics & Linguistics at theUniversity of Edinburgh, Scotland in 1975) and a PhD in linguistics at theUniversity of Birmingham in 1981.^[2][3] Since 1984 she has been Merton Professor of English Language at the University of Oxford.^[3][4][5]

Romaine's research has focused primarily onhistorical linguistics andsociolinguistics, especially problems of societalmultilingualism, linguistic diversity,language change,language acquisition, andlanguage contact. Other areas of interest includecorpus linguistics, language and gender, literacy, and bilingual/immersion education. She has conducted fieldwork on the language ofworking class schoolchildren inScotland, on patterns of bilingualism and language loss amongPunjabi speakers in England, on the language of rural and urban schoolchildren inPapua New Guinea, and also inHawaii.

Her 1982 monographSocio-historical Linguistics; Its Status and Methodology, correlates linguistic variation with external factors as found in historical data, and is regarded as beginning, or laying the foundation for, the field ofsociohistorical linguistics as a sub-discipline.^[6][7]

In 1998 she was awarded an honorary doctorate from theUniversity of Tromsø in Norway, and in 1999 she was awarded one fromUppsala University in Sweden.^[8] She has been a member of theFinnish Academy of Sciences from 2010 on,^[9] and is a member of theNorwegian Academy of Science and Letters.^[10]

She was the editor of the fourth volume ofThe Cambridge History of the English Language.

• Socio-historical Linguistics; Its Status and Methodology Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982
• The Language of Children and Adolescents; The acquisition of communicative competence Oxford: Blackwell, 1984
• Pidgin and Creole Languages London: Longman, 1988
• Bilingualism Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. Second revised edition 1995. Nominated for theBritish Association for Applied Linguistics Book of the Year.
• Language, Education and Development; Urban and Rural Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992
• Language in Society. An Introduction to Sociolinguistics Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Second revised edition 2000.
• Communicating Gender Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1999
• (with Daniel Nettle)Vanishing Voices; The Extinction of the World's Languages New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. (Winner of theBritish Association for Applied Linguistics Book of the Year Prize 2001.^[11][12])

• Suzanne Romaine's University of Hawaii homepage

• 1951 births
• Living people
• Linguists from the United States
• American women linguists
• Bryn Mawr College alumni
• People from Massachusetts
• Fellows of Merton College, Oxford
• Merton Professors of English Language and Literature
• Alumni of the University of Birmingham
• Alumni of the University of Edinburgh
• Members of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters

• CS1 Norwegian-language sources (no)
• Articles with short description
• Short description matches Wikidata
• Use dmy dates from April 2022