Peter Trudgill

Peter Trudgill was born in Norwich in 1943, and attended the City of Norwich School. After studying Modern Languages at King's College Cambridge, he obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh in 1971. He taught in the Department of Linguistic Science at the University of Reading from 1970 to 1986, and then became Professor of Sociolinguistics at the University of Essex. He was Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Lausanne from 1993 to 1998, and is now Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland.

He has carried out linguistic field-work 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 author of: Accent, Dialect and the School; English Accents and Dialects (with Arthur Highes); International English (with Jean Hannah); Applied Sociolinguistics; Dialects in Contact; On Dialect; Language in the British Isles; Dialectology (with J. K. Chambers); The Dialects of England; and numerous other books and articles on sociolinguistics and dialectology. His other Penguin books are Bad Language (with Lars Andersson); Language Myths (with Laurie Bauer); and a lexicon of sociolinguistic terminology Introducing Language and Society. Peter Trudgill is the Honorary President of the Friends of Norfolk Dialect society, and a Fellow of the British Academy.