Ann Lesley Milroy (born March 5, 1944 in

Newcastle upon Tyne Newcastle upon Tyne ( RP: , ), or simply Newcastle, is a city and metropolitan borough in Tyne and Wear, England. The city is located on the River Tyne's northern bank and forms the largest part of the Tyneside built-up area. Newcastle is ...

, UK) is a

sociolinguist Sociolinguistics is the descriptive study of the effect of any or all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way language is used, and society's effect on language. It can overlap with the sociology of l ...

, and a

professor emerita ''Emeritus'' (; female: ''emerita'') is an adjective used to designate a retired chair, professor, pastor, bishop, pope, director, president, prime minister, rabbi, emperor, or other person who has been "permitted to retain as an honorary title ...

at the

University of Michigan , mottoeng = "Arts, Knowledge, Truth" , former_names = Catholepistemiad, or University of Michigania (1817–1821) , budget = $10.3 billion (2021) , endowment = $17 billion (2021)As o ...

. Her work in sociolinguistics focuses on urban and rural

dialectology Dialectology (from Greek , ''dialektos'', "talk, dialect"; and , ''-logia'') is the scientific study of linguistic dialect, a sub-field of sociolinguistics. It studies variations in language based primarily on geographic distribution and their assoc ...

language ideology Language ideology (also known as linguistic ideology or language attitude) is, within anthropology (especially linguistic anthropology), sociolinguistics, and cross-cultural studies, any set of beliefs about languages as they are used in their soc ...

and

standard Standard may refer to: Symbols * Colours, standards and guidons, kinds of military signs * Standard (emblem), a type of a large symbol or emblem used for identification Norms, conventions or requirements * Standard (metrology), an object th ...

Education and Career

Milroy earned her PhD at Queens University Belfast in 1979. She studied and began her work in

sociolinguistics Sociolinguistics is the descriptive study of the effect of any or all aspects of society, including cultural Norm (sociology), norms, expectations, and context (language use), context, on the way language is used, and society's effect on languag ...

in the UK. Milroy held a position at the

University of Newcastle upon Tyne Newcastle University (legally the University of Newcastle upon Tyne) is a UK public research university based in Newcastle upon Tyne, North East England. It has overseas campuses in Singapore and Malaysia. The university is a red brick univer ...

from 1983-1994. She moved to the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...

in 1994, where she worked as a professor and the chair of the department of linguistics at the University of Michigan until she retired in 2004. She has since done some sociolinguistic teaching and lecturing at

Oxford University Oxford () is a city in England. It is the county town and only city of Oxfordshire. In 2020, its population was estimated at 151,584. It is north-west of London, south-east of Birmingham and north-east of Bristol. The city is home to the ...

Contributions to sociolinguistics

Milroy's most famous work examined

social networks A social network is a social structure made up of a set of social actors (such as individuals or organizations), sets of dyadic ties, and other social interactions between actors. The social network perspective provides a set of methods for an ...

and

linguistic variation Variation is a characteristic of language: there is more than one way of saying the same thing. Speakers may vary pronunciation (Accent (sociolinguistics), accent), word choice (lexicon), or morphology and syntax (sometimes called "grammar"). But ...

Belfast Belfast ( , ; from ga, Béal Feirste , meaning 'mouth of the sand-bank ford') is the capital and largest city of Northern Ireland, standing on the banks of the River Lagan on the east coast. It is the 12th-largest city in the United Kingdo ...

in the 1970s. Much of her work has been carried out conjointly with her husband James Milroy, and the two are co-authors to two widely influential books about English

and

. In addition, she has written over seven books and fifteen journal articles, worked as an editorial board member for several research journals, and lectured around the world on her research. Detailed presentation of her research on social networks is found at this link:

Selected publications

Lesley Milroy. 1980. ''Language and social networks''. Oxford: Blackwell. Milroy, Lesley, and James Milroy. 1992. Social Network and Social Class: Toward an Integrated Sociolinguistic Model. ''Language in Society'' 21: 1–26. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4168309. Milroy, Lesley. 2001. Social networks. In Rajend Mesthrie (ed.). ''Concise encyclopedia of sociolinguistics''. Amsterdam: Elsevier Science, 370-6. Milroy, Lesley. 2002. Social networks. In Jack Chambers, Peter Trudgill & Schilling-Estes, Natalie (eds.). ''The handbook of language variation and change''. Oxford: Blackwell, 549-573. Milroy, James, and Lesley Milroy. 2012. ''Authority in Language: Investigating Standard English''. Routledge. ISBN 9780415696838

References

External links

Centre for Research in Linguistics

Sociolinguists Living people 1944 births British emigrants to the United States University of Michigan faculty Dialectologists American sociologists American women sociologists 21st-century American women {{US-linguist-stub Women linguists Linguists from the United States