Gillian Sankoff


Gillian Elizabeth Sankoff is a Canadian-American sociolinguist, and professor emerita of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. Sankoff's notable former students include Miriam Meyerhoff.
She earned her PhD in 1968 from McGill University, with a dissertation entitled, "Social aspects of multilingualism in New Guinea." She is known for her work on Montréal French, on pidgin and creole languages, and on how speakers' use of language changes over the course of their lifespans. Her contributions to the development of the variationist approach to sociolinguistics are documented in interviews featured in Tagliamonte's history of the field.
In 1986 she received a Guggenheim fellowship. A Festschrift in her honor, Social Lives in Language, appeared in 2008. A special panel in her honor was organized as part of the NWAV 41 conference held at Indiana University. She was named a fellow of the Linguistic Society of America in 2018.
She was married to mathematician David Sankoff, then to Canadian-American sociologist Erving Goffman from 1981 to his death in 1982, and subsequently married sociolinguist William Labov in 1993. She is the mother of sociologist Alice Goffman.

Selected publications