Devyani Sharma

Last updated

Devyani Sharma FBA is a sociolinguistics professor and chair of the Linguistics department at Queen Mary University of London. [1]

Contents

Education

Sharma holds a PhD and MA in linguistics from Stanford University and a BA in anthropology/ linguistics and fine art from Dartmouth College.[ citation needed ]

Research

Her research interests include language variation and change, syntactic variation and style. Sharma's work particularly focusses on these topics within World Englishes and British Asian communities. She has written widely on these topics for various publications and has recently served as an associate editor for the Journal of Sociolinguistics.

In recent years Sharma has completed an Economic and Social Research Council funded project on 'Dialect Style and Development in a Diasporic Community' [2] with Ben Rampton and Roxy Harris, both at King's College London.

Sharma has published extensively on British Asian English in addition to a widely used volume on Research Methods with Rob Podesva.

She was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2023. [3]

Personal life

Sharma is the daughter of former Commonwealth Secretary-General Kamalesh Sharma.[ citation needed ]

Works

Related Research Articles

Sociolinguistics is the descriptive study of the effect of any or all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on language and the ways it is used. It can overlap with the sociology of language, which focuses on the effect of language on society. Sociolinguistics overlaps considerably with pragmatics and is closely related to linguistic anthropology.

William Labov is an American linguist widely regarded as the founder of the discipline of variationist sociolinguistics. He has been described as "an enormously original and influential figure who has created much of the methodology" of sociolinguistics.

Peter Trudgill, TBA is an English sociolinguist, academic and author.

California English collectively refers to varieties of American English native to California. As California became one of the most ethnically diverse U.S. states, English speakers from a wide variety of backgrounds began to pick up different linguistic elements from one another and also develop new ones; the result is both divergence and convergence within Californian English. However, linguists who studied English before and immediately after World War II tended to find few, if any, patterns unique to California, and even today most California English still largely aligns to a General or Western American accent. Still, certain newer varieties of California English have been gradually emerging since the late 20th century.

Jenny L. Cheshire is a British sociolinguist and professor at Queen Mary University of London. Her research interests include language variation and change, language contact and dialect convergence, and language in education, with a focus on conversational narratives and spoken English. She is most known for her work on grammatical variation, especially syntax and discourse structures, in adolescent speech and on Multicultural London English.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John R. Rickford</span>

John Russell Rickford is a Guyanese–American academic and author. Rickford is the J. E. Wallace Sterling Professor of Linguistics and the Humanities at Stanford University's Department of Linguistics and the Stanford Graduate School of Education, where he has taught since 1980. His book Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English, which he wrote together with his son, Russell J. Rickford, won the American Book Award in 2000.

Neilson Voyne Smith FBA, known as Neil Smith, was Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at University College London.

Ann Lesley Milroy is a sociolinguist, and a professor emerita at the University of Michigan. Her work in sociolinguistics focuses on urban and rural dialectology, language ideology and standard.

Hagit Borer is a professor of linguistics at Queen Mary University of London. Her research falls within the area of Generative Grammar.

Penelope "Penny" Eckert is Albert Ray Lang Professor Emerita of Linguistics at Stanford University. She specializes in variationist sociolinguistics and is the author of several scholarly works on language and gender. She served as the president of the Linguistic Society of America in 2018.

Suzanne Romaine is an American linguist known for work on historical linguistics and sociolinguistics. From 1984 to 2014 she was Merton Professor of English language at the University of Oxford.

Mary Dalrymple, FBA is a British linguist who is professor of syntax at Oxford University. At Oxford, she is a fellow of Linacre College. Prior to that she was a lecturer in linguistics at King's College London, a senior member of the research staff at the Palo Alto Research Center in the Natural Language Theory and Technology group and a computer scientist at SRI International.

Susan Lynn Ehrlich is a Canadian linguist known for her work in both language and gender, language and the law, and the intersections between them. She studies language, gender and the law, with a focus on consent and coercion in rape trials.

April Mary Scott McMahon is a British academic administrator and linguist, who is Vice President for Teaching, Learning and Students at the University of Manchester.

Bencie Woll FAAAS is an American–British linguist and scholar of sign language. She became the first professor of sign language in the United Kingdom when she was appointed Professor of Sign Language and Deaf Studies at City University, London in 1995. In 2005, she moved to University College London where she became Professor of Sign Language and Deaf Studies and Director of the Deafness, Cognition and Language Research Centre (DCAL).

The British Academy presents 18 awards and medals to recognise achievement in the humanities and social sciences.

Deborah Sue Schiffrin was an American linguist who researched areas of discourse analysis and sociolinguistics, producing seminal work on the topic of English discourse markers.

Paul Kerswill, FBA, is a sociolinguist. Since 2012, he has been professor in the department of language and linguistic science at the University of York. After completing his undergraduate degree and doctorate at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, he was a research assistant from 1985 to 1986 at the University of Cambridge, before working as a lecturer at the University of Reading until his appointment in 2004 as a professor at Lancaster University.

John Gordon Baugh V is an American academic and linguist. His main areas of study are sociolinguistics, forensic linguistics, education, and African American language studies. He is currently the Margaret Bush Wilson Professor in Arts and Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, Professor Emeritus at Stanford University, and President of the Linguistic Society of America. In 2020 Baugh was elected as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in the section on Linguistics and Language Sciences, and in 2021 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Jennifer Smith, PhD, FRSE is a sociolinguistic specialist in language variation and dialects, especially Scottish dialects across the generations and geography of Scotland, including developing the Scottish syntax atlas which analyses the diversity. Her research also covers variations in colonial English, for example, in North America. Professor of sociolinguistics at the University of Glasgow School of Critical Studies, she teaches and researches language and variation theory.

References

  1. "Devyani Sharma, Linguistics". Queen Mary University of London . Retrieved 23 May 2016.
  2. "Research Council UK". Gateway to Research. Archived from the original on 7 February 2017. Retrieved 6 February 2017.
  3. "Professor Devyani Sharma FBA". The British Academy. Retrieved 21 October 2023.