Shana Poplack

Shana Poplack is an American-born linguist, Distinguished University Professor in the linguistics department at the University of Ottawa and a three-time holder of the Canada Research Chair, Tier I, in Linguistics. Born in Detroit, Michigan, and raised in New York City, she studied at Queens College and New York University, then under Andre Martinet at the Sorbonne in Paris, before earning her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1979 under William Labov; she joined the University of Ottawa faculty in 1981. She specializes in variation theory and sociolinguistics, extending Labov foundational work through large-scale digitized databases of vernacular speech, and her research spans language contact, bilingual code-switching and the historical reconstruction of African American Vernacular English, demonstrating that fluent code-mixing reflects bilingual competence rather than linguistic deficiency; she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1998 and appointed a Member of the Order of Canada in 2014.