Peter Trudgill

Peter Trudgill, FBA (; born 7 November 1943) is a sociolinguist, academic and author. He was born in Norwich, England, where 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 Honorary Professor of Sociolinguistics at the University of East Anglia, in Norwich, England. On June 2, 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; and the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. 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 is the honorary president of the Friends of Norfolk Dialect society, and contributes a regular column on language and languages in Europe to the New European newspaper. Trudgill is a well-known authority on dialects, as well as being one of the first to apply Labovian sociolinguistic methodology in the UK, and to provide a framework for studying dialect contact phenomena. 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 2