Peter Trudgill

Who is Peter Trudgill?

Peter Trudgill, FBA is a sociolinguist, academic and author. He was born in Norwich, England, where 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. He is now part time professor of sociolinguistics at the University of Agder in Kristiansand, Norway, and adjunct professor at the Research centre for linguistic typology at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia, as well as honorary professor at the University of East Anglia, in Norwich, England.

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 is the honorary president of the Friends of Norfolk dialect society, and contributes a regular column on language and dialect to the Eastern Daily Press newspaper.