Suzanne Romaine

Suzanne Romaine (born 1951) is an American linguist known for work on historical linguistics and sociolinguistics. From 1984 to 2014 she was Merton Professor of English language at the University of Oxford.

Romaine was born in Massachusetts in 1951, and received an A.B. magna cum laude in German & Linguistics in 1973 from Bryn Mawr College; she then received a masters in Phonetics & Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland in 1975) and a Ph.D in Linguistics at the University of Birmingham in 1981.

Since 1984 she has been Merton Professor of English Language at the University of Oxford. In 1998 she was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Tromsø in Norway, and in 1999 she was awarded one from Uppsala University in Sweden.

Romaine's research has focused primarily on historical linguistics and sociolinguistics, especially problems of societal multilingualism, linguistic diversity, language change, language acquisition, and language contact. Other areas of interest include corpus linguistics, language and gender, literacy, and bilingual/immersion education. She has conducted fieldwork on the language of working class schoolchildren in Scotland. on patterns of bilingualism and language loss among Punjabi speakers in England, in Papua New Guinea on the language of rural and urban schoolchildren, and also in Hawaii.

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