Sali A. Tagliamonte, professor and chair in the Department of Linguistics, was recently named the 2023 winner of the Canadian Linguistic Association’s National Achievement Award.
The awards are presented each year to individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the field of linguistics and who have earned distinction for themselves and the Canadian linguistics community.
The award selection committee cited Tagliamonte as a “world-leading scholar of variationist sociolinguistics” whose “sterling global reputation rests upon several foundations including her astute development of theory, her pivotal embrace of discipline-changing methodology, and the impact of these contributions on description in the field.”
Tagliamonte’s main area of research is language variation and change, a field in which she currently holds the Canada Research Chair. Her widely-cited work has focused on varieties of English, including projects related to many communities within the province of Ontario. She has researched and written extensively on dialects in Scotland and North America, and on internet and youth language.
Further, Tagliamonte has published six scholarly books as well as 85 journal articles. Early in her career, she began leading advances in statistical and quantitative methods for studying language variation and change. In this regard, she helped develop the Goldvarb statistical program for conducting logistic regression of variationist sociolinguistic data.
A remarkable teacher and mentor, Tagliamonte is also a skilled public commentator who is noted for her sensitive and innovative fieldwork techniques. She has served as chair of her department since 2018, and was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2013. She is also a Fellow of the Linguistic Association of America, and the past recipient of a Killam Research Fellowship.