Raymond Kevin Hickey (born 3 June 1954) is an Irish linguist specialising in the English language in Ireland,especially in the capital Dublin,working within the sociolinguistic paradigm of language variation and change. Hickey has also worked on the Irish language,specifically the phonology of the modern language. For both Irish and English in Ireland he has carried out extensive fieldwork for over three decades.
Outside his own professional context Hickey frequently discusses linguistic issues and has been an invited guest on Irish radio[2] and in Irish newspapers,such as The Irish Times[3][4] in particular to comment on language attitudes and/or change and their relevance to society in general.
Education and career
Hickey studied German and Italian at Trinity College,Dublin and after attaining his M.A. moved to the University of Kiel,Germany,where he completed his PhD in 1980.[5][6] He was awarded his second doctorate degree (German:Habilitation) in 1985 at the University of Bonn where he was appointed professor of English linguistics in 1987.[5][6] In 1991 he moved to the University of Munich,then in 1993 to the University of Bayreuth and the following year to the University of Essen[5][6] (since 2003 the University of Duisburg-Essen) where he held the chair for General Linguistics and Varieties of English[7] until 2020. He is currently Adjunct Professor at the Faculty of Arts,Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Limerick,Ireland.[8][9] Hickey has been visiting professor at a number of international universities and is on the editorial board of several journals.[6][10] His book publications have been and continue with major publishing houses such as Cambridge University Press,Oxford University Press,Wiley-Blackwell,de Gruyter Mouton and John Benjamins.[1]
Research contributions
Among the contributions he has made to linguistic research is the notion of supraregionalisation[11] by which is meant the rise of a non-local form of language used across a broad section of society and expressing its linguistic identity. He has also tracked the sociolinguistically motivated change in Dublin English over the past three decades[12] and compiled a Corpus of Irish English[13] with appropriate software. In the area of Irish phonology,Hickey has devised a maximally concise system of description which captures many linguistically valid generalisations about the sound structure of that language.[14] More generally he has been concerned with internal and external factors in language change,[15] the course of such change[16] and the complex of new dialect formation.[17] Among his recent research foci have been life-span[18] changes and 'bad data',fragmentary data from poorly documented sources which nonetheless can provide insights into language change.[19] The study of areal features,those shared by languages or varieties in geographically delimited regions,also received impetus from his research and this field of language contact and change.[20]
In 2020 Hickey was appointed the general editor of the New Cambridge History of the English Language.[21] This comprehensive work in six volumes is intended to reflect recent research insights as well as new theories and methods in English historical linguistics. Here Hickey has emphasised that the history of English is a series of 'streams' which arose during the colonial period at several locations throughout the world and led to the rise of different standards of the language,e.g. in Canada,South Africa or New Zealand,[22] all of which are independent of,though related to the standard of English in Britain.
With the book Life and Language Beyond Earth[23] Hickey has offered a broad-based,interdisciplinary consideration of whether intelligent forms of life might exist on exoplanets and be,in principle,able to engage in interstellar contact. Covering issues from astronomy,evolutionary biology,paleoanthropology,neuroscience and linguistics,the book assesses the likelihood of intelligent exolife arising and how systems of communication,functionally comparable to human language,might develop on other planets with conditions and environments similar to those on Earth.[23] The book garnered praise from the Astronomer Royal,Lord Martin Rees,[23] describing the book as ‘bringing astronomy and linguistics together'.[24]
In 2019 a festschrift appeared for Hickey,Processes of Change:Studies in Late Modern and Present-Day English,edited by Sandra Jansen and Lucia Siebers,with contributions concentrating on recent changes in varieties of English.[25]
Several computer books about database management systems.
Hickey,Raymond 1980. Satzstrukturen des Deutschen und Englischen,eine kontrastive Analyse im Rahmen der Dependenzgrammatik. [Sentence structures in German and English,a contrastive analysis within the framework of dependency grammar]. PhD thesis,University of Kiel.
Hickey,Raymond,Merja Kytö,Ian Lancashire and Matti Rissanen (eds) 1997. Tracing the Trail of Time. Proceedings of the conference on diachronic corpora,Toronto,May 1995. Amsterdam:Rodopi.
Articles/chapters
About 200 articles in various linguistic journals and chapters in edited volumes.[26][27]
↑ "Raymond Hickey". Europa-Universität Flensburg (EUF). Flensburg: Europa-Universität Flensburg (EUF). 6 November 2023. Retrieved 4 July 2025.
↑ Hickey, Raymond (6 November 2023). "Raymond Hickey". raymondhickey.com. Raymond Hickey. Retrieved 4 July 2025.
↑ 'Supraregionalisation and dissociation', in: J. K. Chambers and Natalie Schilling (eds) Handbook of Language Variation and Change. Second edition. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013, pp. 537-554.
↑ 'Development and change in Dublin English', in: Ernst Håkon Jahr (ed.) Language Change. Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics. Berlin: Mouton-de Gruyter, 1998, pp. 209-243, Hickey, Raymond 2005. Dublin English. Evolution and Change. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. See also the research website Variation and Change in Dublin English.
↑ The Sound Structure of Modern Irish. Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton, 2014, especially pp. 39-176.
↑ 'Internally and externally motivated language change', in: Juan Manuel Hernández-Compoy and Juan Camilo Conde-Silvestre (eds) The Handbook of Historical Sociolinguistics. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, pp. 401-421.
↑ 'Ebb and flow. A cautionary tale of language change', in: Teresa Fanego, Belén Mendez-Naya and Elena Seoane (eds) Sounds, words, texts, change. Selected papers from the Eleventh International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (11 ICEHL). Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2002, pp. 105-128.
↑ 'How do dialects get the features they have? On the process of new dialect formation', in: Raymond Hickey (ed.) Motives for Language Change. Cambridge: University Press, 2003, pp. 213-239.
↑ 'Twentieth-century Received Pronunciation: Stop articulation', in: Raymond Hickey (ed.) Listening to the Past. Audio Records of Accents of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017, pp. 66-84.
↑ Keeping in Touch. Familiar Letters across the English-speaking World. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2019.
↑ Areal Features of the Anglophone World. Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton, 2012; The Cambridge Handbook of Areal Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.
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