معرفی
Dr. Naomi Nagy is Professor and Chair of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Toronto, Faculty of Arts and Science. She teaches courses on sociolinguistics, language variation and change, and heritage languages at both undergraduate and graduate levels. Her academic career spans over two decades with previous appointments at the University of New Hampshire and visiting positions at institutions worldwide.
- Ph.D. in Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania (1996)
- B.A. cum Laude in Linguistics (with Honors) and French, Dartmouth College (1989)
Dr. Nagy's research focuses on sociolinguistics, particularly language variation and change in heritage language contexts. She specializes in understanding language contact through variationist sociolinguistic approaches, with particular expertise in Faetar (a Francoprovençal dialect), heritage languages, language contact phenomena, New England English dialects, phonetics, and sociolinguistic variation in Toronto's multilingual communities. Her work examines how languages change across generations in contact situations, with a focus on maintaining linguistic complexity in heritage language contexts.
Her extensive publication record demonstrates consistent contributions to understanding heritage language variation across multiple languages including Italian, Russian, Korean, Tagalog, and Cantonese. Her research reveals that heritage languages maintain significant complexity and often follow similar patterns of variation as homeland varieties, challenging assumptions about simplification in heritage language grammars.
- Dean's Research Excellence Award, University of Toronto (2022)
- Dean's Excellence Award, University of Toronto (2016, 2017, 2021, 2022)
- LabEx Visiting Professor (Chaire Internationale 2022), Université de Paris (Spring 2022)
- Marco Polo Visiting Professor, University of Groningen (Summer 2015)
- Distinguished Visiting Professor, Queen Mary University London (March 2013)
Dr. Nagy has successfully supervised numerous graduate students and secured significant research funding. She directs the Heritage Language Variation and Change (HLVC) Project, which has received multiple grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), including Insight Grants for 'Ethnolinguistic variation and change: coordinating production and perception' (2018-2025) and 'Heritage languages speakers in Toronto -- what do they tell sociolinguists?' (2015-2022). Her research has involved over 50 students in its first two years and continues to expand.
Dr. Nagy leads the Heritage Language Variation and Change in Toronto Project, which documents and analyzes variation in 10 heritage languages spoken in Toronto (Cantonese, Faetar, Hungarian, Italian, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Tagalog and Ukrainian). She has also developed methodology and a corpus of recorded conversational data for these languages. Additionally, she has worked extensively on documenting Faetar, an endangered Francoprovençal language, creating a descriptive grammar, online teaching materials, and currently developing #FPglobal, a social media platform to support inter-dialectal communication in Francoprovençal.
