Professor Shana Poplack, Distinguished University Professor and Canada Research Chair in the Department of Linguistics is the recipient of the Pierre Chauveau Medal by the Royal Society of Canada.
The award, which recognizes extraordinary achievement in the social sciences and humanities, will be presented in November at the society’s awards banquet.
Shana Poplack is the foremost proponent of linguistic variation theory in Canada. Her work has had a profound effect in the fields of bilingualism, New World Romance languages, Creole studies, and minority dialects in general.
In her research work, she collects and analyzes large bodies of natural speech data housed at one of the most dynamic and productive sociolinguistic laboratories in the world, which she founded and has directed since 1982.
Funded at consistently high levels by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, her projects focus on a variety of spoken-language phenomena involving linguistic variation and change over time and across communities. Her studies of contemporary Ottawa-Hull French, African Nova Scotian English, 19th-century Quebec French, Quebec English as a minority language and numerous Canadian immigrant communities have contributed profoundly to our knowledge of the diversity of Canadian speech.
Shana Poplack was named Faculty of Arts Professor of the Year in 1999, and received the University of Ottawa Excellence in Research award in 2003.
