Suzanne Romaine
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Background and career
Romaine was born in Massachusetts in 1951, and received an A.B. magna cum laude in German & Linguistics in 1973 from Bryn Mawr College; she then received a master's degree in Phonetics & Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland in 1975) and a PhD in linguistics at the University of Birmingham in 1981. Since 1984 she has been Merton Professor of English Language at the University of Oxford.
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Research
Romaine's research has focused primarily on historical linguistics and sociolinguistics, especially problems of societal multilingualism, linguistic diversity, language change, language acquisition, and language contact. Other areas of interest include corpus linguistics, language and gender, literacy, and bilingual/immersion education. She has conducted fieldwork on the language of working class schoolchildren in Scotland, on patterns of bilingualism and language loss among Punjabi speakers in England, on the language of rural and urban schoolchildren in Papua New Guinea, and also in Hawaii.
Her 1982 monograph Socio-historical Linguistics; Its Status and Methodology, correlates linguistic variation with external factors as found in historical data, and is regarded as beginning, or laying the foundation for, the field of sociohistorical linguistics as a sub-discipline.
Honors and awards
In 1998 she was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Tromsø in Norway, and in 1999 she was awarded one from Uppsala University in Sweden. She has been a member of the Finnish Academy of Sciences from 2010 on, and is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.
She was the editor of the fourth volume of The Cambridge History of the English Language.