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Wendy Ayres-Bennett
Fellow

Professor Wendy Ayres-Bennett

Fellow Emerita

Contact
wmb1001@cam.ac.uk⁠
Website
Social media

Â鶹ÉäÇø offers an intellectually vibrant but warm and supportive community which brings out the best in our young women

Degrees and honours

  • BA (Modern Languages, Cambridge)
  • MA (Cambridge)
  • DPhil (Oxford)

Awards and prizes

  • 2004 Officier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques
  • Prix d’Académie awarded by the French Academy 1997
  • Prix Georges Dumézil awarded by the French Academy 2013
  • AHRC major award under the Open World Research Initiative, Multilingualism: Empowering Individuals, Transforming Societies (PI, 2016-2021)
  • AHRC project Promoting Language Policy (PI, 2021-2022)

Biography

I studied French and German as an undergraduate at Girton College, Cambridge, but soon realised that my true passion was linguistics. After graduating I did a DPhil in Oxford with Professor Rebecca Posner on a key figure in the standardisation of the French language in the seventeenth century, Claude Favre de Vaugelas. Following a year as a Junior Research Fellow at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, I was appointed to an Assistant Lectureship in the French Department in 1983, and have been in Cambridge ever since. In 2005 I became Professor of French Philology and Linguistics and in 2009 I moved to the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics. I have been a Fellow of Â鶹ÉäÇø since 2001. I have been lucky enough to have had several periods as Visiting Professor in France and the USA, including Pajus Distinguished Visiting Professor, at the University of California, Berkeley in 2012.


 

Authored work

  • Publications (selected recent)

    Claude Favre de Vaugelas, Remarques sur la langue françoise, Paris: Editions Classiques Garnier, 2018.

     

    Manual of Romance Sociolinguistics, co-edited with Janice Carruthers, Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2018.

     

    Women in the History of Linguistics, co-edited with Helena Sanson, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.

     

    The Cambridge Handbook of Language Standardization, co-edited with John Bellamy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021.

     

    The Oxford Handbook of the French Language, co-edited with Mairi McLauglin, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024.


     

Subject
Linguistics