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Thursday 14th October, 4pm (Click here to join the webinar)
Meeting ID: 861 3131 4703
Passcode: 907869
This webinar is the fifth in a series of invited lectures titled ‘Varieties of English’. The series explores the diversity of the English language today and discusses methods of categorisation, description of features, use and status of contemporary varieties of English around the world. As the English language and its varieties are located within histories of expansion, (post-)colonialism, and globalisation, many of the webinars investigate these histories and contemporary issues. Topics of the series will span critical issues of language variation and change, such as social indexing, attitudes and standardisation, English-based creoles and pidgins and English as a global language.
The series is specifically organised for the benefit of the MA Applied Linguistics (International) module ‘Varieties of English’ (Dr Maria Rieder) and will be pitched at postgraduate students, but all are very welcome to attend.
Bio: Professor S.N. Sridhar is SUNY Distinguished Service Professor, Professor of Linguistics and India Studies, and Director of the Mattoo Center for India Studies at Stony Brook University, where he has been teaching since 1980. He graduated from Central College, Bangalore University, with a B.A. (Honors) and M.A. in English literature and linguistics with a first class and the first rank for the University. He did a Ph.D. in Linguistics with distinction at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Professor Sridhar is an internationally recognized expert on multilingualism, Indian linguistics, World Englishes, and Kannada. His research concerns bilingualism (language contact and convergence); sociolinguistics of code-switching and code-mixing, language modernization, language spread; second language acquisition in non-native settings; Indian English and other World Englishes; reference grammar of Kannada (syntax, morphology, social dimensions); psycholinguistics (sentence production, code-mixing), applied linguistics (scope and relation to linguistic theory), historical linguistics (acquisition of subjecthood, contact-induced language change), and history of linguistics (Indian grammatical tradition).
Professor Sridhar’s research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Education, and the American Institute of Indian Studies. He was designated Senior/Superior Scholar in the Humanities by the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is a co-founder of South Asian Languages Analysis (SALA) and the founding Director of the Center for India Studies at Stony Brook, which has evolved over two decades into a national model of Indian American community-public university partnership in developing India Studies. He has been a plenary or keynote speaker at many international conferences, including the Linguistic Society of India in 2013, and member of editorial board of journals, evaluator of publication projects and academic programs. He was conferred the select faculty rank of Distinguished Service Professor by the State University of New York in 2011. He is Vice-President and President Elect of the International Association of World Englishes.