BIOGRAPHY
Ruth King is a professor in the Linguistics Section of the Department of Languages, Literatures and Linguistics at York University (Toronto). A Newfoundlander, she completed an undergraduate degree in French Studies at Memorial University followed by a year as an English-language teaching assistant in France. Upon returning to Newfoundland, she did an M.A. in French and a Ph.D. in Linguistics. Her M.A. research comprised a description of the French spoken in the Franco-Acadian community of L’Anse-à-Canards on Newfoundland’s west coast while her Ph.D. investigated syntactic variation and change in this same community and in three neighbouring communities. All her work on Newfoundland French is based on her extensive fieldwork in the communities. She subsequently supervised fieldwork in Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia Acadian communities in collaboration with the ethnographer Gary R. Butler.
Her research is concerned with leading questions regarding variation and change in the history of French over the centuries. This research is based on historical and dialectal documentation, archival audio recordings for early and mid 20th century Acadian French, and sociolinguistic interviews for the late 20th century. In her work, she draws on the perspectives of both variationist sociolinguistics and formal linguistic theory. A second line of research involves representations of minority languages (and dialects) in the media and their relationship to language and identity. A third line of research has centred around language and gender, including debates regarding language reform.
She has published three books, two of which are concerned with Acadian French: The Lexical Basis of Grammatical Borrowing (2000) and Acadian French in Time and Space (2013) along with numerous journal articles, including Diachronica, Discourse & Society, Isogloss, Language, Language in Society, Language Variation and Change, Probus, and Journal of Sociolinguistics.
Contact
⚲ South 553 Ross Building, York University, Toronto, Canada M3J 1P3
✆ 416-736-5016 (Department of Languages, Literatures and Linguistics)
✉ rking@yorku.ca