Suzanne Romaine

Short Biography

Suzanne Romaine has been Merton Professor of English Language at the University of Oxford since 1984. Her research interests lie primarily in historical linguistics and sociolinguistics, especially in problems of societal multilingualism, linguistic diversity, language change, language acquisition, and language contact in the broadest sense. She has conducted extensive fieldwork in Europe (first on the language of working-class schoolchildren in Scotland and subsequently on patterns of bilingualism and language loss among Panjabi speakers in England) as well as in the Pacific Islands region (first in Papua New Guinea on the language of rural and urban schoolchildren, and most recently in Hawaii). Her most recent book, Vanishing Voices. The Extinction of the World's Languages (Oxford University Press, 2000), co-authored with Daniel Nettle, won the British Association of Applied Linguistics Book of the Year Prize in 2001.