Member of the Order of Canada
Awarded on: 2014-05-08
Invested on: 2015-02-13
For her groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of the sociolinguistic evolution of language.
Shana Poplack is a groundbreaking sociolinguist who sheds light on language change and variation. The Canada Research Chair in Linguistics at the University of Ottawa, she has become a leading expert in several domains. She has refuted foundational theories through her inquiries into the evolution of spoken Canadian French and the origins of African-American Vernacular English, as well as through her studies on the patterns of language mixing in bilingual communities. As a result of her successes, linguistic research methods have been vastly transformed. Her work on marginalized language communities has also helped combat the stigma often faced by these groups.