Professor Miriam Meyerhoff

Professor Miriam Meyerhoff

Linguistics, Social Anthropology
Senior Research Fellow since 2020

My research examines the sociolinguistic constraints on variation, principally in communities characterised by language or dialect contact. I am currently engaged in a long-term project with the Nkep-speaking community in Vanuatu to document their language. I also have ongoing projects looking at variation and change and language contact in Auckland English, and the early and late stages of the Austronesian language family. Much of my work has been on Creoles – a particularly rewarding area of study. Their (typical) lack of standardisation means there is a lot of variation and change. They are generally used in post-colonial communities with long histories of struggles over identity and in which globalisation raises new questions over cultural and linguistic differentiation. I have published descriptive and variationist papers on features at virtually all levels of linguistic structure, but my primary interest remains syntactic and discourse factors.

Links
Email: miriam.meyerhoff@all-souls.ox.ac.uk
ORCID
Research Areas
Sociolinguistics
Variation and Change
Language Contact
Pacific Languages
Vanuatu

Selected Publications

Laef long Espiritu Santo. Port Vila: Vanuatu Cultural Centre.

 ISBN: 978-982-9167-08-8 (Harrisson, T. (Tom) H. 1936. Living in Espiritu Santo. The Geographical Journal, Vol. 88, No. 3 (Sep., 1936), pp. 243-261. Edited and translated by Miriam Meyerhoff.)

The Windward Island Creoles. (James A. Walker & Miriam Meyerhoff)

Stephanie Hackert (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Caribbean English. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

What is variationist sociolinguistics and where is it going?

Yoshiyuki Asahi, Alexandra D’Arcy, Paul Kerswill (eds) Handbook of Variationist Sociolinguistics.

Māori – English contact in New Zealand: Verbal hygiene practices and evaluative outcomes.

Australian Journal of Linguistics. DOI:10.1080/07268602.2025.2512895

Pragmatics of second person address variation in New Zealand Sign Language (NZSL). (Rachel McKee, Mireille Vale, George Major, Sara Pivac Alexander, Miriam Meyerhoff)

Lingua. 325, Article 104009.

Kinship terms in Nkep (East Santo).

Te Reo: Special issue on Vanuatu languages 68 (4). (Tihomir Rangelov, Eleanor Ridge & Lana Takau, eds.)

Current grants
  • Royal Society of New Zealand, Marsden Fund, A new theory for the sound change within New Zealand English. 2025-2027. (PIs Catherine Watson, Elaine Ballard, AI M Meyerhoff)
  • Royal Society of New Zealand, Marsden Fund, From roots to branches: language evolution in the Austronesian family tree. 2024-2027. (PIs Victoria Chen, Mary Walworth, AI M Meyerhoff)
  • MCSA4Ukraine, Linguistic aspects of managing face-threats in weight loss advice delivery in primary care (LiMa Weight). (PI Liliia Bespala, AI/Mentors C Albury, M Meyerhoff)