Penelope Gardner-Chloros appointed Professor of Sociolinguistics and Language Contact
Penelope Gardner-Chloros has been appointed Professor of Sociolinguistics and Language contact, taking up post at the start of this academic year.
Professor Gardner-Chloros joined Birkbeck in 1990. Before that she worked in Strasbourg, where she did a doctorate on the contact between French and the Alsatian Dialect, and then at Essex, as a British Academy post-doctoral Fellow.
She has a long-standing interest in code-switching (the use of more than one language or dialect in conversation), which is considered by many to be the most common form of multilingual communication, and is of interest from the grammatical, sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic perspective. She also has interests in comparative politeness, especially Tu/Vous systems, and in the applications of linguistics to other fields, including literature and the arts.
She is currently working on a comparison of multicultural London English and multicultural Paris French. By comparing language variation and change in the two locations Professor Gardner-Chloros and her colleagues will attempt to identify general processes of language contact and language variation and change in large multicultural metropolises. The project will lead to a better understanding of sociolinguistic aspects of language contact and also social questions connected with migration and the consequences for education.
Professor Gardner-Chloros teaches on a number of undergraduate and postgraduate programmes, including modules on bilingualism, sociolinguistics and linguistic issues in Europe.