Sali Tagliamonte

SALI A. TAGLIAMONTE is a Canadian who was born in a small town in Northern Ontario. She wrote and published poetry as a teenager but when she went to University in Toronto in the late 1970's she discovered Linguistics. She went to graduate school in Ottawa Ontario in the 1980's where she worked on dialects of English spoken by people of African descent in the Caribbean and Canada. She spent her early academic career in England working on dialects from the far north shore of Scotland to Devon in the southwest. She returned to Canada in 2001 and has been working on Canadian dialects ever since. She lives in Toronto on an oak ravine with her husband and changing combinations of their five children aged 9-29.

At work Sali is currently Professor of Linguistics at the University of Toronto, Canada and an Honorary Visiting Professor at the University of York in York, England. She is author of "Analysing Sociolinguistic Variation" (CUP 2006), Variationist Sociolinguistics (2012), Roots of English (2013) and co-author of "African American English in the Diaspora: Tense and Aspect" (Blackwell 2001). She has published research papers on African American varieties, British, Irish and Canadian dialects, teen language and television. Her ongoing research focuses on comparing dialects in time and space with the goal to understanding how and why languages change.