Trudgill Peter - Language Myths

PENGUIN BOOKS

LANGUAGE MYTHS

Laurie Bauer is Reader in Linguistics at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He is the author of many books and articles on word-formation, international varieties of English and language change in current English, including Watching English Change (1994).

Peter Trudgill is Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. He has also taught at the universities of Reading, Essex and Lausanne. He is the author of a number of books on dialect, and on language and society, including Sociolinguistics (1974; fourth edition, Penguin 2000).

EDITED BY

Laurie Bauer and Peter Trudgill

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

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Published in Penguin Books 1998

Copyright Laurie Bauer and Peter Trudgill, 1998

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ISBN:978-0-14-193910-0

Jean Aitchison is the Rupert Murdoch Professor of Language and Communication at the University of Oxford. In her research, she is concerned with the mental lexicon, language change and the language of the media. She is the author of several books, including Language Change: Progress or decay? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd edn 1991), Words in the Mind: An introduction to the mental lexicon (Oxford: Blackwell, 2nd edn 1994), The Language Web: The power and problem of words (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

John Algeo is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Georgia. He is co-author of Origins and Development of the English Language (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 4th edn 1993) and author of Fifty Years among the New Words (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Editor of volume 6 of the Cambridge History of the English Language on English in North America, he is past President of the American Dialect Society and of the Dictionary Society of North America. For ten years he was editor of American Speech, the journal of the American Dialect Society, and for ten years with his wife Adele wrote the quarterly column Among the New Words for that same journal.

Lars-Gunnar Andersson, Professor of Modern Swedish at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, received his Ph.D. in linguistics in 1975 from the University of Gothenburg, where he also conducted his undergraduate studies. He has lectured at several universities and attended conferences in Europe, the USA and southern Africa. He has done most of his linguistic work in syntax, semantics, typology and sociolinguistics. He has co-written two books on the local dialect of Gothenburg and is also co-author, with two others, of Logic in Linguistics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). Together with Peter Trudgill he has written Bad Language (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), and together with Tore Janson, Languages in Botswana (Gaborone: Longman Botswana, 1997). He is also a columnist on a daily newspaper in Gothenburg.

Laurie Bauer is Reader in Linguistics at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. A graduate of the University of Edinburgh, he is the author of many books and articles on word-formation, international varieties of English and, most recently, language change in current English. His books include English Word-Formation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), Introducing Linguistic Morphology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1988) and Watching English Change (London and New York: Longman, 1994).

Winifred Bauer is a New Zealander who for over twenty years has devoted her research to the Maori language, and she has a number of publications in that field, including Maori (London and New York: Routledge, 1993) and the Reed Reference Grammar of Maori (Auckland: Reed, 1997). She has taught at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in England and Odense University in Denmark. She is an Honorary Research Fellow at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.

Edward Carney read English at University College, London. He spent most of the 1950s in Sweden, teaching in the Department of English at the University of Lund. In the early 1960s he joined the newly established Department of Linguistics in the University of Manchester, where he eventually became Senior Lecturer in Phonetics. At present he is a Senior Research Fellow in the department. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists.

J. K. Chambers is Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Toronto. As a child, he braved the howling winds on the tundra to reach the warmth of the pot-bellied stove and teacher in the one-room schoolhouse in Stoney Creek. He has written extensively about Canadian English, beginning with Canadian Raising in 1973 and including Canadian English: Origins and structures (Toronto: Methuen, 1975), the first book on the topic. More general research includes studies of dialect acquisition, dialect topography and linguistic variation. He is co-author (with Peter Trudgill) of Dialectology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd edn 1997) and author of Sociolinguistic Theory: Language variation and its social significance (Oxford and New York: Blackwell, 1995).

Jenny Cheshire is Professor of Linguistics at Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London. She has researched and published on language variation and change, modern English syntax, and different aspects of language in society. Recent editions include English around the World: Sociolinguistic perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) and, with Dieter Stein, Taming the Vernacular: From dialect to written standard language (London and New York: Longman, 1997). She is currently writing a book on the syntax of spoken English and co-directing, with Paul Kerswill, a research project on dialect levelling in three English cities.

John H. Esling is Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada. He is Secretary of the International Phonetic Association (http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/IPA/ipa.html), and his research is on the auditory categorization of voice quality and on the phonetic production of laryngeal and pharyngeal speech sounds. He is the author of the University of Victoria Phonetic Database on CD-ROM and has participated in the development of several phonetics teaching and speech analysis software programs.