Gregory Guy

Who is Gregory Guy?

Gregory R. Guy is a linguist who specializes in the study of language variation and language diversity, including sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, phonetics and phonology. He has a particular interest in the Brazilian Portuguese and Spanish languages.

He received his first of two B.A. degrees from Central High School in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and went on to receive his B.A. from Boston University in 1972, and M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1975 and 1981. His PhD dissertation described syntactic change in spoken Brazilian Portuguese.

Guy is now a Professor of Linguistics at New York University and has taught at Sydney, Temple, Cornell, Stanford, and York University in Toronto, Canada, and at Institutes of the Linguistic Society of America and the Associação Brasileira de Lingüística. In sociolinguistics he has focused on language variation, language contact, quantitative methods, and the connection between social diversity and language change. He has conducted research on Brazilian Portuguese, Australian and American English, and Dominican and Argentine Spanish. Recent research projects include an investigation of ‘sociolinguistic universals’ with funding from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada.