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2005 - Professor
Peter Trudgill
Citation for the award of degree of
Doctor of Letters (honoris causa)
Peter Trudgill is the leading scholar,
across the linguistic world, in the study of dialectology and sociolinguistics.
Every linguistics student reads his books and articles, and imbibes the
principles of the discipline from the incisive, insightful — and
often downright exciting — writings of Professor Trudgill.
After gaining his BA from Cambridge, and MA and PhD from Edinburgh, Peter
Trudgill began his teaching career at the University of Reading where
he was appointed professor when barely forty years of age. Since then
he has held chairs at the Universities of Essex, Lausanne and Fribourg.
He has been elected fellow of five prestigious academies — the British
Academy, the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, the Royal Norwegian
Society of Sciences of Letters, the Agder Academy of Sciences, and the
Royal Gustavus Adolphus Academy for Swedish Folk Culture. In recognition
of his international standing, Peter Trudgill was presented with a Festschrift
on his 60th birthday, in 2003. And there has been a volume explaining
and explicating his work, Sociolingüistica Británica, introducción
a la obra de Peter Trudgill, published in Barcelona.
He is the author of almost 150 scholarly articles, author or co-author
of about 20 books and editor of a dozen more. His seminal text, Sociolinguistics,
first published in 1974, has been through four editions and been reprinted
seventeen times. It has been translated into Swedish, Japanese and Malay.
Professor Trudgill's other books have been translated into Norwegian,
Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, French, Spanish, Hungarian, and
Chinese.
He does not confine himself to the written word. Besides delivering lectures
across five continents, Peter Trudgill's linguistic insights have been
featured on radio programs in six countries and on television.
In addition to broad, state-of-the-art monographs on language in its social
setting, and on dialectology, Professor Trudgill has pursued intensive
study of Scots, Irish and other dialects of the British Isles, of American
English and of the New Zealand variety. He has published widely on the
linguistic development of Modern Greek and Modern Norwegian , on the endangered
Albanian dialects in Greece and on the sociolinguistic situation in several
regions of Europe. He has also contributed to the study of pidgins and
creoles, and general problems of linguistic geography, and the diffusion
of linguistic features in language contact. And to consideration of English
as an international language, the question of standard and non-standard
dialects of English and their implications for educational policies, and
the interrelation between linguistic typology and sociolinguistics.
Peter Trudgill has examined the linguistic features of pop songs. And
he shared his problems in visiting his wife's homeland with a best-selling
volume Coping with America: a beginner's guide to the USA. This was short
listed for the Thomas Cook travel book prize, and has been translated
into French.
Peter Trudgill hails, most proudly, from Norwich. His PhD thesis (published
by Cambridge University Press in 1974) was on The social differentiation
of English in Norwich. He has also published on 'sex, covert prestige,
and linguistic change' and on verbal forms in the urban dialect of Norwich.
It was thus entirely appropriate that in 2002, Professor Trudgill was
awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of East Anglia. This
followed a similar honour, in 1995, from the University of Uppsala.
He is on the editorial boards of 14 journals, and has been Visiting Professor
at 16 universities in the USA, Canada, Australia (at the ANU), New Zealand,
Japan, Hong Kong, India, Norway, Denmark and Switzerland.
All in all, Peter Trudgill is without peer in the breadth of his work,
and in the groundbreaking contribution he has made to the advancement
of linguistic knowledge.
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