James Walker

James Walker is Professor of Language Diversity, Director of the Centre for Research on Language Diversity, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. His research examines the social and language-internal conditioning of variation at all levels of language, from phonetics/phonology through morphology and syntax to discourse-pragmatics. He has conducted research on Sango (Central African Republic), the history of African American English, Australian English, the English spoken in Quebec (Canada) and Bequia (St Vincent and the Grenadines), ethnolinguistic variation in Toronto and Sweden, and Brazilian Portuguese.

At the University of Toronto, he completed a BA in Linguistics (1989) and an MA in Anthropology (1991) before working in information development at IBM Canada (1992-1995). He completed an MA (1995) and Ph.D. (2000) in Linguistics at the University of Ottawa. From 2000 he held positions of Assistant and Associate Professor of Linguistics at York University (Toronto), where he was promoted to Full Professor in 2014. In 2017 he accepted his current position at La Trobe University. From 2017 to 2020 he served as Head of the Department of Languages and Linguistics.