ProfessorJanet Holmes

Janet Holmes is Emeritus Professor in Linguistics at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand and an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit (2016). She is Associate Director of the Wellington Language in the Workplace project, an ongoing study of communication in the workplace which has described small talk, humour, management strategies, directives, and leadership in a wide range of New Zealand workplaces. She was also Director of the project which produced the Wellington Corpus of Spoken New Zealand English which is available on CD-ROM. In the early 1990s, with Allan Bell and Mary Boyce, she conducted the first social dialect survey of New Zealand English in the Wellington area. Her publications include a textbook, An Introduction to Sociolinguistics, now in its sixth edition, the first book of articles in sociolinguistics, Sociolinguistics, co-edited with John Pride, a book on sociolinguistic methodology co-edited with Kirk Hazen Research Methods in Sociolinguistics, the first book of sociolinguistic and pragmatic articles on New Zealand English, New Zealand Ways of Speaking English, co-edited with Allan Bell, several books on language and gender, including Gendered Talk at Work, Women, Men and Politeness, the Blackwell Handbook of Language, Gender and Sexuality, co-edited with Susan Ehrlich and Miriam Meyerhoff, and an edited collection of papers Gendered Speech in Social Context. She has also published on a range of sociolinguistic and pragmatics topics, including New Zealand English, New Zealand women's usage, sexist language, pragmatic particles and hedges, compliments, apologies, disagreement, humour and small talk, and many other aspects of workplace discourse