Peter Trudgill

Peter Trudgill ( ; born 7 November 1943) is an English sociolinguist, academic and author.

Biography Trudgill was born in Norwich, England, and grew up in the area of Thorpe St Andrew. He attended the City of Norwich School from 1955. Trudgill studied modern languages at King's College, Cambridge and obtained a PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 1971.

Before becoming professor of sociolinguistics at the University of Essex, he taught in the Department of Linguistic Science at the University of Reading from 1970 to 1986. He was professor of English language and linguistics at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, from 1993 to 1998, and then at the University of Fribourg, also in Switzerland, from which he retired in September 2005, and where he is now professor emeritus of English Linguistics.

He is an honorary Professor of Sociolinguistics at the University of East Anglia, in Norwich, England. On 2 June 1995 he received an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Humanities at Uppsala University, Sweden. He also has honorary doctorates from UEA; La Trobe University, Melbourne; the University of Patras, Greece; the University of Murcia, Spain; the University of Lublin, Poland; and the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.

He has carried out linguistic fieldwork 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 has been the president of the Friends of Norfolk Dialect society since its inception in 1999 and contributes a regular column on language and languages in Europe to The New European newspaper.

Trudgill is one of the first to apply Labovian sociolinguistic methodology in the UK and to provide a framework for studying dialect contact phenomena.

He has carried out studies on rhoticity in English and tracked trends in British rock music for decades, including the Beatles' decreased pronunciation of /r/s over the course of the 1960s. He was a member of the committee for England and Wales for the Atlas Linguarum Europae in the 1970s, doing some research on the East Anglian sites.

He is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters and a Fellow of the British Academy.

Since February 2017, Trudgill has written weekly columns relating to European languages in the weekly newspaper The New European. At the end of 2017, he signed the Declaration on the Common Language of the Croats, Serbs, Bosniaks and Montenegrins.