Shana Poplack

Who is Shana Poplack?

Shana Poplack, FRSC is a leading proponent of variation theory, the approach to language science pioneered by William Labov. She has extended the methodology and theory of this field into bilingual speech patterns, the prescription-praxis dialectic in the co-evolution of standard and non-standard languages, and the comparative reconstruction of ancestral speech varieties, including African American Vernacular English.

She is a Distinguished University Professor in the linguistics department of the University of Ottawa, where she directs the Sociolinguistics Laboratory and holds the Canada Research Chair in Linguistics. Born in Detroit, Michigan, and raised in New York City, she studied at Queens College and New York University, then lived in Paris for several years, studying with André Martinet at the Sorbonne before moving to the University of Pennsylvania, where she took her PhD under Labov's supervision.

During three years as a researcher at the Centro de estudios puertorriqueños, City University of New York, her studies of code-switching among Puerto Ricans in New York initiated her characterization of universal patterns of intrasentential language mixing, and demonstrated that fluent code-mixing is a bilingual skill rather than a defect. Over three decades, she made numerous contributions to the understanding of bilingual syntax in social context, many involving typologically contrasting language pairs.