Dialect Matters: Respecting Vernacular Language

Peter Trudgill is a theoretical dialectologist and sociolinguist who has held professorships at the Universities of Reading, Essex, Lausanne, and Fribourg. He is currently Professor of Sociolinguistics at the University of Agder, Kristiansand, Norway, and Honorary Professor of Sociolinguistics at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, and has been awarded honorary doctorates by the University of Uppsala, Sweden; the University of East Anglia; and La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. He has authored and edited more than forty books, including Sociolinguistics: An Introduction; Dialects in Contact; New-Dialect Formation: The Inevitability of Colonial Englishes; Investigations in Sociohistorical Linguistics: Stories of Colonisation and Contact (Cambridge, 2010); and Sociolinguistic Typology: Social Determinants of Linguistic Complexity.