Personal History: Peter Trudgill

Published in: E.K. Brown & V. Law (eds.)(2002), Linguistics in Britain. Oxford: Blackwell
[Publications of the Philological Society 36], 286-296.
(Further Information: http://www.um.es/tonosdigital/znum6/perfiles/HernandezCampoy.htm)

It was sort of a secret schoolboy vice that I had. I read all the foreign language
grammars in the local library, and collected as much information as I could find about
the languages of the world. Having started French, German and Latin at grammar
school, I then asked for, and got, Teach Yourself Spanish and Teach Yourself Malay
as birthday and Christmas presents. Together with my school friend John Sandford,
now Professor of German at Reading University, I became, as we hitch-hiked round
Europe in the 1960s, interested in Flemish and Luxemburgish and Plattdeutsch and
Swiss German as well as other languages we encountered such as Italian and Greek
and Macedonian. Thus, like many other people of my generation, I became interested
in linguistics without knowing that there was any such thing.
In spite of having some very good teachers at the City of Norwich grammar
School, I knew nothing about linguistics and went up to Cambridge to study French
and German at King’s believing that this was the only way to pursue my interests. I
was not a naturally gifted practical linguist – although once at Cambridge I took
additional classes in Polish for a while out of interest – and hopeless as a literary
scholar. One of the most important things ever to happen to me, therefore, was to find
quite by chance a copy of Hockett (1958) lying around on a table in the Modern
Languages Library at Sidgwick Avenue. This, I realised as I turned the pages, was
what I was really interested in. Talking to other students, I then learnt that it was
actually possible to study this topic. Soon afterwards, at the beginning of my second
year, my tutor, the very distinguished literary scholar R. R. Bolgar, asked me to write
an essay on the novel A Rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans. I sat down to read it and
had an overwhelming sense that not only did I really not want to read it at all but that
I was not going to. (I still have this book on my shelves, its pages uncut.) Very
nervous and self-effacing Norfolkman that I was, I went timidly back to Bolgar and
said that I believed that there was a subject called General Linguistics and that I was
considering dropping French Literature in favour of that. He smiled and replied: “I
think that would be a very good idea”.
In due course, then, I ended up studying General Linguistics at Cambridge – under
the supervision of, first, John Trim, and later of Eleanor Higginbottom – as well as
the Histories of the English, French and German languages. Particularly instructive
were supervisions on the history of French from Jim Laidlaw (see below) and classes
on the History of English from John Bromwich. John Lyons, recently departed for
Edinburgh, also made impressive guest appearances giving lectures on Chomsky.
Wanting to continue my linguistics studies after graduation, during my last
undergraduate year at Cambridge I applied to the Australian National University in
Canberra for a scholarship to work on Aboriginal Languages. As part of my

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application, I sent them a description I had written – which I had been too nervous
and self-effacing to show to anybody in Cambridge – of the phonology of Norfolk
English. I eventually got cold feet, however, and withdrew my application, timidly
but probably correctly believing that I was ill-equipped to work on Australian
languages. Instead, at the suggestion of Eleanor Higginbottom, who I was eventually
brave enough to confide in about my interest in dialectology and my desire to
continue in that field, I applied to join the 2-year MA course at UCL – for which I
was interviewed by a very amiable Bob Dixon – and for the one-year Diploma in
General Linguistics at Edinburgh. I was accepted for both, but my fate was decided
by some nameless official in the Department of Education who decided to award me
a one-year rather than a two-year State Studentship.
I initially floundered somewhat on the Diploma course, on which we had excellent
training from, amongst others, John Lyons, Ron Asher, Erik Fudge, Keith Brown and
John Laver, and felt rather intimidated by my failure to understand what generative
grammar was for – a problem solved for me by Dinneen’s excellent textbook
(Dinneen, 1967). John Lyons was later kind enough to refer to the 1966-67 group of
Diploma students at Edinburgh as his “annus mirabilis”. We were all of us people
who had not known what linguistics was until we became undergraduates; who had
been fortunate enough to benefit from the State Studentship postgraduate grant
system; and who were later able to obtain posts as universities rapidly expanded their
linguistics teaching in the 1960s and 1970s. We included amongst others Mike
Garman, now Professor at Reading; Gerry Knowles, now at Lancaster University,
who had been with me (and Martin Harris) at Cambridge, who was very influential in
developing my thinking; and Barbara Bird, an excellent phonetician, who teaches
English Linguistics at the University of Oslo.
In the week after my graduation from Cambridge I had had another happy
encounter, by chance, with a book. Walking around Heffers bookshop in Cambridge,
I came across Capell’s Studies in Socio-linguistics (1966) and bought it, having been
seduced by the title: I was not sure what it meant. but was very attracted to the idea
that linguistics could in some way be related to the study of society. It turned out that
Capell’s book, which is very anthropological-linguistic in emphasis, was not quite
what I thought it was going to be, although I could not at that time have said exactly
what I was expecting. There was not much sociolinguistics taught as part of the
Edinburgh course.
A third happy chance encounter with a book was therefore very fortunate. In
Bauermeister’s book shop in Edinburgh, in November 1966, I came across the
volume edited by Bill Bright, arising out of the first ever Sociolinguistics conference,
at UCLA in 1964, entitled Sociolinguistics – this time, significantly, without a
hyphen. It contained early article ‘Hypercorrection by the lower middle-class as a
factor in linguistic change’. I immediately bought the book, even though it was much
more than I could afford (£5-16-6), and discovered, on reading Labov, that this was
what I was expecting under the heading of “sociolinguistics”, and this was what I
wanted to do with my academic life.

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 John Lyons encouraged us as Diploma students to work on linguistic topics of our
own choice, and at some stage during 1967 I wrote an essay for him on
sociolinguistics, including references to the work of Labov, McDavid and others who
appeared in the Bright volume. This kind of work was new to him too, and he was
extremely encouraging about and supportive of my interest in it. I later, therefore,
plucked up courage to ask him, again rather nervously, if I could do a Ph.D. in the
area I had written on – the sociolinguistic study of linguistic change – and he agreed.
I had not yet seen Labov’s The Social Stratification of English in New York City
(1966)but I knew enough about it to be sure that I wanted to do a sociolinguistic
urban dialect study according to this model. I thought – for reasons that I now fail to
altogether understand but which probably had to do with a timid assumption that no
one could possibly be interested in Norwich – that I would be expected as an
Edinburgh student to work on the dialect of Edinburgh, until one day when Keith
Brown said that, surely, I would be much better off working on my own dialect. And
so, of course, that is what, with considerable relief and undying gratitude to him, I
decided to do, rather anxiously worrying that, given this exciting new field of
Labovian sociolinguistics, someone else might get in there and do it before me.
I was a Ph.D. student at Edinburgh, then, from 1967 to 1970. The financial details
of my career are, I believe, rather salutory. I was not successful in an application for a
further State Studentship. However, as there were then no fees of any significance to
pay, I believed that I ought to try and make a start and, with help from my parents,
and feeling rather panicky, I did so. John Lyons then came to the rescue. He found
departmental money to pay for me to do some office work and to give undergraduate
tutorials – some of my students turned out to be rather successful, notably Alison
White, later Eliot, who went on to teach linguistics at Sussex, and Gregory James
who is now teaching linguistics in Hong Kong. Chance also again played a part in my
further progress: I wrote to my Cambridge tutor in the history of the French
Language, Jim Laidlaw of Clare College, who later became Professor at Aberdeen,
and told him – out of gratitude for the encouragement he had given me earlier – what
I was doing. He wrote back and reminded me that my college, Kings’, might be
prepared to help me financially. I had foolishly not even considered this. I wrote to
the Bursar at King’s, the late Ken Polack, who immediately agreed that the College
would make me an award for my first year. My problems were finally solved when,
for my last two years, Edinburgh University, no doubt encouraged by the example of
King’s, awarded me a University Scholarship. I think it is rather obvious that, had I
been a student today, I would have had no chance of a career in academic linguistics.
People often describe me as the first British sociolinguist. Actually this is a title
that should probably be accorded to R.B. Le Page, unless it should go to Halliday or
Firth. However, when I started work on my Ph.D., I was not familiar with Bob’s work
at all, and, without having any real awareness that this was the case, I became the first
student in Britain to start to work in the Labovian linguistic-variation-and-change
paradigm (though I believe that Gerry Knowles with his work on Liverpool was not
far behind). I was therefore very much on my own in making decisions as to how to
carry out my research and what my objectives were. John Lyons, saying that he knew

3
nothing about my research area, handed over responsibility for me to the phonetician
and dialectologist Bill Jones, and the Scottish dialectologist Jim Mather. Of course,
they knew nothing about what I was doing either, although they were very helpful
and encouraging. If in later years some of my Ph.D. students have thought that I have
taken a rather ‘hands-off’ approach to their supervision, this undoubtedly dates from
my own experiences of working almost entirely by myself, a very educational
although, I suppose, not entirely to be recommended experience. What I should have
done, of course, was to contact Labov himself to tell him what I was doing, but
naturally I was too nervous and self-effacing to do that. This was something else
which never even occurred to me.
I was due to run out of grant money at the end of my three years in June 1970, and
was planning to finish my thesis by then (which indeed I did). It was therefore with
great interest that I saw, in January that year, that the Department of Linguistic
Science at Reading University was advertising a lectureship in sociolinguistics – the
timing, another stroke of good fortune, could not have been better. On my way down
to Reading to be interviewed for the job, I suddenly realised, somewhere around
Newcastle, that I might actually get the post. What on earth would I teach if I did get
it? I had never attended a course in sociolinguistics as such – there weren’t any – and
I had never read a textbook on sociolinguistics – there weren’t any of those either. So
as I travelled south, I worked out what I thought a lecture course in sociolinguistics
might look like. The final form, arrived at somewhere around Peterborough, looked
very much like the contents of the first edition of my Penguin book (see below). At
Reading, I was interviewed by Frank Palmer, David Crystal, David Wilkins and,
sitting rather disconcertingly behind me, Peter Matthews. One of the first questions
Palmer asked me was: “If you got this job, and we asked you to teach a course in
sociolinguistics, what would you teach?”. Crystal vouchsafed afterwards that I had
been the only candidate able to answer that question at length and in clear sequential
detail, a sign I suppose of the extent to which those of us working in the field were
very much breaking new ground.
I began teaching in the Department of Linguistic Science at Reading University in
the autumn of 1970. One important thing that has stayed with me, from my four years
at Edinburgh and my sixteen years at Reading, is the insistance of both Lyons and
Palmer that their departments be ‘school neutral’. There was, of course, in the 1960s
and early 1970s a lot of emphasis on the work of Chomsky and his associates, but in
both departments at that time it was felt to be important that students should know
about other approaches to linguistics as well. In this kind of atmosphere, and with the
approval of Palmer, it was easy for me to develop teaching and research at Reading in
sociolinguistics and dialectology as I wished. I had valuable advice and
encouragement from Crystal and from Malcolm Petyt, but essentially I was a 26-
year-old sociolinguist making it up as I went along.
Towards the end of my first year at Reading, in July 1971, I was awarded an
Edinburgh Ph.D. for my thesis The Social Differentiation of English in Norwich, later
published by C.U.P. (1974), with Le Page as my external examiner. I was also during
this year required to make a presentation at a staff seminar, for which I wrote my

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paper ‘Sex, covert prestige and linguistic change in the urban British English of
Norwich’ (1972). Crystal, who was on the editorial board of the newly formed
journal Language in Society, heard the paper and immediately sent it off to the editor
Dell Hymes to suggest publication. During the summer of 1971 I was on holiday in
Norway when I received a letter from my mother. Did I, she asked, know someone
called William Labov? Labov, it emerged, was on the editorial board of Language in
Society, and had seen my submitted paper. He is, of course, not at all nervous or self-
effacing and, while on a field trip around Britain, figuring that all proud parents
would have copies of their offspring’s Ph.D. dissertations to hand, arrived in
Norwich, looked in the phone-book, and telephoned my parents. He had tea with
them, and while enjoying, as everyone does, my mother’s cake, scanned through my
thesis. The contact that I should have initiated much earlier was thus made. I finally
met Labov the following year in Philadelphia, and there followed an academic
friendship which has lasted to the present and which has been enormously helpful and
inspirational to me. There also followed invitations to attend conferences in the
United States, and my work – no thanks to any initiatives from my reticent Norfolk
self – began to be known internationally. I have always since then taken pains to
assure students that it is not only in order but actually polite to get in touch with well-
known scholars whose field they are working in to inform them of what they, as
students, are doing. Such scholars are, after all, as we all soon come to realise, just
people.
I will, then, admit to being instrumental in introducing Labovian linguistics to
Britain. I believe, however, that from very early on there was a distinctively British
flavour to the work of sociolinguists in this country. This owes much to Bob Le Page,
whose influence is clear in the work of other British sociolinguists such as Jim
Milroy and Lesley Milroy, as well as in the work of the British-based American
Suzanne Romaine. This influence is particularly noticeable in the extent to which
research in Britain has very often focussed on the role of identity, and on the extent to
which notions such as language, dialect, variety and speech community are
problematical. This is clear already in my edited book Sociolinguistic Patterns in
British English (1978), the title of which was intended to be a homage to Labov,
reflecting the title of his own book Sociolinguistic Patterns, and which contained
papers by the leading British-based sociolinguists of the time, including the Milroys,
Romaine, Knowles, and Jenny Cheshire.
I think that if I personally have had any influence, it has been along the two main
lines already visible in my book Sociolinguistics: An Introduction To Language And
Society. This, incidentally, was commissioned by Crystal for his new series
immediately after I had made my first staff seminar presentation (see above).
Obviously, once again I was fortunate enough to be in the right place at the right
time. It was one of the very first textbooks exclusively on sociolinguistics ever
written. It owed a lot to my Ph.D., and to Labov, especially to his insistence on
sociolinguistics as a way of doing linguistics and his emphasis on the necessity for
the empirical study of the speech of ordinary speakers in a social context. It was also
based on other reading I had done in the area of work by scholars such as Fishman

5
and Gumperz, as well as on conversations I had had with my fellow Edinburgh Ph.D.
students, such as Mike Garman who had been working in India, and Arne Kjell
Foldvik, from Norway (now teaching linguistics at the University of Trondheim) who
had fascinating tales to tell about the sociolinguistic situation in that country. One
contribution I have been able to make subsequently to sociolinguistics has been that
my knowledge of Norwegian – learnt mainly from Arne Kjell’s parents over a
number of summer vacations – has enabled me to incorporate much Scandinavian
sociolinguistic research into my own work – see Trudgill (1986), for instance – and to
help to introduce this research to other sociolinguists in Britain and elsewhere. I was
also keen to promote the idea of linguistic human rights – as we would now call it.
This was something which had struck me as a vitally important issue when Lyons, in
his first introductory lecture to us on the Edinburgh diploma course, had argued that
all languages and dialects were equally complex and structured, expressive systems.
The perception of the importance of this issue was reinforced by the distress I felt at
the extent to which it had become apparent to me that many of the people I
interviewed and recorded in Norwich for my Ph.D. research had been made to feel
ashamed and humiliated by their local dialect and accent. My first two Ph.D. students
at Reading were Viv Edwards, now once again at Reading as Professor of Language
and Education, and Jenny Cheshire, now Professor of Linguistics at Queen Mary
College, London University. It is interesting to see that they, too, and in their turn
their students, have both been very concerned with linguistic human rights, and with
the study of the vernacular – and in fact these issues have been characteristic of
British work in sociolinguistics in general in the last 30 years – so perhaps I had a
hand in that.
These two issues – sociolinguistics as a form of linguistics, and linguistic human
rights (particularly for minority language and dialect speakers) – came together early
in my career in a rather surprising way. As I began to work my way into the
sociolinguistics milieu and tradition, it never occurred to me that sociolinguistics was
anything other a way of doing linguistics. Firth was obviously a linguist. So were Le
Page and Labov. Their linguistics was socially informed and socially sensitive, but it
was linguistics. However, it gradually became clear to me in those early years that
there were many other scholars doing what was, in my young opinion, very good
work and which they referred to as sociolinguistics which, however, seemed to have
very little to do with what Le Page or Labov or I were doing. I am thinking here, for
example, of work in the social psychology of language, the sociology of language,
discourse analysis, ethnomethodology, and the like. This did not appear to me to be a
particularly problematical matter, except insofar as it was perhaps giving rise to
misunderstandings, not least on the part of the growing number of students who were
being attracted to courses in sociolinguistics. The point was that much of the work by
people who were carrying out research under the rubric of ‘sociolinguistics’ was
valuable and insightful, but it seemed that not everybody involved was clear about
the fact that scholars were working with different – sometimes very different –
objectives. These enterprises could interact in ways that were mutually beneficial, but

6
I felt it was as well to point out that the umbrella term ‘sociolinguistics’ had become
at least potentially confusing.
I therefore gave a short presentation at the 1977 International Congress of
Linguists in Vienna on this topic. I had been invited to contribute to a panel
discussion following a paper by the leading ethnomethodologist Aaron Cicourel, and
this seemed an appropriate moment. I simply suggested, rather nervously to the 3,000
or so people present, that it was well to be clear about the fact that some
sociolinguistics, like Labov’s, was aimed at answering questions which were, quite
legitimately, of no professional concern to Aaron Cicourel, such as why are human
languages like they are, how and why do languages change, and so on. Other people,
such as Cicourel himself, were doing research which was aimed at answering
questions which were, quite legitimately, of no professional concern to me (though as
a human being I might be very interested), such as why are human societies like they
are, and why is human social interaction like it is. I also pointed out that some work
had mixed objectives – to find out more simultaneously about both language and
society and their interrelationships. This point was immediately misunderstood. (It
has also been misunderstood subsequently, so I suppose that has to be my own fault.)
Tove Skutnabb-Kangas, someone whose work I have subsequently come to know and
appreciate, stood up and accused me of disparaging work in Applied Sociolinguistics
i.e. work in the application of the results of sociolinguistic research to the solution of
real-world (educational, political, social) problems. This was not what I meant at all. I
had felt since my Edinburgh days that sociolinguists had a duty to help to solve
whatever social problems they could. (And if I had been less surprised by her attack, I
would have pointed to my Accent, Dialect and the School (1975) – a book which
incidentally was rather influential amongst teachers and in education colleges for
many years – as evidence of this!) I was therefore very grateful to Michael Halliday,
for standing up and arguing that what I had said was quite valid and that both types of
academic sociolinguistic work had applications in the non-academic world; and that
to point out that social-scientifically oriented sociolinguistics was different from
linguistically-oriented sociolinguistics was in no way to argue against the social
mobilisation of sociolinguistic research findings.
I no longer work in Britain, having been attracted to Switzerland in the early
1990s – with the encouragement of Jenny Cheshire – by the fascinating
sociolinguistic situation, the research tradition in anglistics, the respect – and
therefore time made available – for scholarship and research, the wonderfully
liberating absence of bureaucracy and formal evaluation, and, yes, the high salaries. I
like to think, however, that I remain very much in touch with the British
sociolinguistic scene; and I believe that the following history is very relevant. In the
late 1970s, a group of British-based sociolinguists started an informal organisation
which arranged small conferences which we called Sociolinguistic Symposia. Early
participants included Bob Le Page, Euan Reid, Suzanne Romaine, Jim Milroy, Lesley
Milroy, Jenny Cheshire, and a number of others including myself and, as an
influential overseas visitor, Jack Chambers. These meetings were initially set up
because sociolinguists in Britain felt that the meetings of the Linguistics Association

7
of Great Britain, excellent as they were, continued to be dominated by non-
sociolinguistic concerns, and we wanted a forum where we could meet and discuss
issues of concern to ourselves intensively and in depth. Present at these meetings
were practitioners of sociolinguistics with linguistic, social scientific and mixed
objectives and motivations, although the former probably dominated. And of course
there were also papers dealing with Applied Sociolinguistic themes. These meetings
as, eventually, annual events gradually became bigger and bigger and attracted
international attention, particularly when we were able to invite distinguished
speakers from abroad, most notably Labov himself. More recently, there has been
another interesting development. The Sociolinguistic Symposium at Cardiff in 1997
was by common consent a very successful meeting. It was also very large – at one
point there were ten parallel sessions. It was, however, the perception of many,
particularly younger scholars, that work in linguistically-motivated sociolinguistics
was at this meeting very much dominated, in numerical terms, by work in
sociolinguistics which had social-scientific and/or social-interactional objectives,
notably various forms of discourse analysis. Interestingly, this led to the formation by
younger British scholars of another breakaway organisation which had its first small
conference on Linguistic Variation and Change at the University of Reading later in
1997. The second, called VIEW (Variation is EveryWhere), took place at Essex in
September 2000.
My point in narrating this bit of British academic sociology is that I hope very
much that, in spite of the fact that linguistically-motivated work in sociolinguistics
can be time-consuming and expensive, it will not be swamped by other sorts of
research also labelled sociolinguistics. It is most encouraging to note, therefore, that
work in Britain in Labovian sociolinguistics is currently undergoing a renaissance,
led by people such as Paul Kerswill, my successor at Reading, and my former
students David Britain and Enam Al-Wer at the University of Essex. The book Urban
Voice (Foulkes & Docherty 1999), which includes work by what we can perhaps call
a third generation of secular linguistics scholars in Britain, is an excellent illustration
of this point. If I have played any part at all over the past thirty years in the
development of such work, I shall be very pleased indeed.

References

BRIGHT, WILLIAM, 1966. Sociolinguistics, The Hague: Mouton.

CAPELL, ARTHUR, 1966. Studies in Socio-linguistics, The Hague: Mouton.
DINNEEN, FRANCIS, 1967. An Introduction to General Linguistics, New York: Holt,
Rinehart and Winston.
FOULKES, PAUL and GERRY DOCHERTY (eds.), 1999. Urban Voices, London: Edward
Arnold.
HOCKETT, CHARLES, 1958. A Course In Modern Linguistics, New York: Macmillan.
LABOV, WILLIAM, 1966. The Social Stratification of English in New York City.
Washington, D.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics.

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LABOV, WILLIAM, 1972. Sociolinguistic Patterns. Oxford: Blackwell.
TRUDGILL, PETER, 1972. ‘Sex, covert prestige and linguistic change in the urban
British English of Norwich’, Language in Society1, 179-195.
TRUDGILL, PETER, 1974. The Social Differentiation of English in Norwich,
Cambridge University Press.
TRUDGILL, PETER, 1974. Sociolinguistics: an Introduction to Language And Society
(fourth edition 2000), London: Penguin.
TRUDGILL, PETER, 1975. Accent, Dialect and the School, London: Edward Arnold.
TRUDGILL, PETER (ed.), 1978. Sociolinguistic Patterns in British English, London:
Edward Arnold.
TRUDGILL, PETER, 1986. Dialects in Contact, Oxford: Blackwell.

TRUDGILL, Peter John, FBA 1989; Fellow of the Norwegian Academy of

Sciences and Letters 1995; Fellow of the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences
1996;Professor of English Linguistics, University of Fribourg, Switzerland since
1998; b. 1943; m. 1968 Sandra Walker, 1980 Jean Marie Hannah; Educ. City of
Norwich School; BA (MA) in Modern and Mediaeval Languages, King’s College,
Cambridge 1963-66; Postgraduate Diploma in General Linguistics, University of
Edinburgh 1967; PhD, University of Edinburgh 1971; Department of Linguistic
Science, University of Reading: Assistant Lecturer 1970-73, Lecturer 1973-78,
Reader 1978-83, Professor (Personal Chair) 1983-86; Department of Language and
Linguistics, University of Essex: Reader in Sociolinguistics 1986-87, Professor of
Sociolinguistics (Personal Chair) 1987-92; Department of English, University of
Lausanne, Switzerland: Professor of English Language and Linguistics 1993-98.
Doctorate Honoris Causa, Faculty of Letters, Uppsala University, Sweden, June 2,
1995; President of the Societas Linguistica Europaea, 1992-93; Vice-President of the
Societas Linguistica Europaea 1993-94. Committee membership: Social Science
Research Council Linguistics Panel 1975-78, Academic Advisory Board Linguistic
Minorities Project London University Institute of Education 1979-82, Advisory
Group European Science Foundation Adult Language Acquisition Project 1981-83,
Longman’s Advisory Panel on Linguistics and Lexicography 1981-1999, Social
Science Research Council Education and Human Development Committee 1982,
Institute for Functional Research of Language and Language Use University of
Amsterdam 1988-, CNAA Advisory Panel 1988-90, Evaluation Committee on
Linguistics University of East Anglia 1989, Committee for Swiss Association of
Applied Linguistics 1993-1998, Appointment Committee for Swedish Chair in
Sociolinguistics 1980, Appointment Committee for Tromsø University Chair of
English 1989. Member Editorial Boards: English World Wide 1980-91, American
Speech 1981-85, Language Sciences 1981-, Papers in Geolinguistics 1986-, Oxford
International Encyclopaedia of Linguistics 1986-90, Norsk Lingvistisk Tidsskrift
1987-, Language Variation and Change 1989-, Nordic Journal of Linguistics 1990-,
International Journal of Applied Linguistics 1990-, Atlas Linguarum Europae 1990-
93, Multilingua 1993-, Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 1995-, Journal of

9
Sociolingusitcs 1996-, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 1996-,
European Journal of English Studies 1997-, Journal of Greek Linguistics 1999-,
Poznan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics 1999-. Edited books: Sociolinguistic
patterns in British English; Language in the British Isles; Applied sociolinguistics;
English dialects: studies in grammatical variation [with J.K. Chambers]; The
sociolinguistics reader [with J. Cheshire]; Language myths [with L. Bauer]. Major
books:The social differentiation of English in Norwich; Sociolinguistics: an
introduction to language and society; Accent dialect and the school; English accents
and dialects: an introduction to social and regional varieties of British English [with
A. Hughes]; Dialectology [with J.K. Chambers]; International English: a guide to
varieties of Standard English [with J. Hannah]; On dialect: social and geographical
perspectives; Coping with America: a beginner’s guide to the USA; Dialects in
contact; The Dialects of England; Bad language [with L.G. Andersson]; Introducing
language and society; Dialects.

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