Awards & Achievements
Killam Prizes
2007 Recipient - Shana Poplack
World-renowned sociolinguist Shana Poplack studies language as it is spoken, rather than intuited. Her innovative methods demonstrated that bilingual language switching is a skill, not a defect, and that borrowed vocabulary does not disrupt the recipient-language grammar. She proved that Black English originated not in a creole, but as a resistant offshoot of Early Modern English. She discovered that Canadian French grammatical features routinely ascribed to contact with English are natural internal developments.
Dr. Poplack studied in France and the United States, earning her PhD at the University of Pennsylvania, before joining the University of Ottawa in 1981. An unbroken string of Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada research grants, have funded her world-acclaimed Sociolinguistics Laboratory. She is Canada Research Chair in Linguistics and Distinguished University Professor at the University of Ottawa, a Killam Research Fellow (2001), a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and a recipient of the Society’s Chauveau Medal (2005).