Professor Miriam Meyerhoff

“My research deals with language variation and change in its broadest perspective. As well as an active research programme investigating variation in situations of language and dialect contact, I have long-standing interests in the ways social ideologies affect language use and perceptions of language users. In particular, I am interested in ideologies of gender and language. My work often combines quantitative methods with qualitative analysis to the mutual benefit of both, I hope.

“My current research is mainly focused on variation and change in the N'kep speaking community of Hog Harbour, Vanuatu. This work is supported by a grant from the Endangered Languages Research Project (2010-2013) and involves basic descriptive work on the community's language, with a sociolinguistic perspective on language variation. The community is concerned about language attrition in the face of pressure from Bislama and English. This project is a welcome return to Vanuatu for me: I conducted fieldwork for my PhD in 1994-95 in Santo township and on Malo island, and I have come back to Vanuatu regularly in the years since.

“I have other ongoing corpus-based projects looking at language contact/creolisation: one focuses on the creole spoken in Bequia [St Vincent and the Grenadines] (with James Walker, York University, Canada); another focuses on the acquisition of language variation in teenage migrants in Edinburgh and London (with Erik Schleef, University of Manchester).

“I am Co-Editor (with Umberto Ansaldo, University of Hong Kong) of the Creole Language Library (John Benjamins). I am also currently editing the second edition of the Handbook of Language and Gender (Wiley-Blackwell) with Susan Ehrlich (York University, Canada). Sue and I are also co-editors of the Language and Sexuality section of the Encyclopedia of Human Sexuality (Wiley-Blackwell).”

Professor Miriam Meyerhoff
Department of Applied Language Studies and Linguistics
Professor of Linguistics

Phone: + 64 9 373 7599 ext 85236
Email: m.meyerhoff@auckland.ac.nz

Useful links
Department of Applied Language Studies and Linguistics
Professor Miriam Meyerhoff's staff page