Profile:

Wendy Ayres-Bennett is Professor of French Philology and Linguistics, University of Cambridge. She specialises in the history of French and the history of linguistic thought. Her research interests include standardisation and codification, linguistic ideology and policy, variation and change. She was the lead researcher on a major AHRC-funded project on the genre of observations on the French language, the outputs of which included a large electronic corpus of texts about the "correct" use of French, and she is now directing a second phase of the project. Other current projects include a co-edited volume on Romance sociolinguistics and another on women in the history of linguistics. She is the author of 12 books (monographs and co-edited volumes), 3 special journal issues, and over 50 articles.