Raymond Hickey is an Irish linguist specialising in the English language in Ireland, especially in the capital Dublin, working within the sociolinguistic paradigm of language variation and change. Hickey has also worked on the Irish language, specifically the phonology of the modern language. For both Irish and English in Ireland he has carried out extensive fieldwork for over three decades. Hickey's research also covers the wider field of varieties of English – in particular their historical development and spread overseas during the colonial period – language contact, areal linguistics and language typology, as well as the history of English, both the development of its phonology and the language in the eighteenth century which led to the standardisation of English. Outside his own professional context Hickey frequently discusses linguistic issues and has been an invited guest on Irish radio and in Irish newspapers, such as the Irish Times in particular to comment on language attitudes and/or change and their relevance to society in general.
Among the contributions he has made to linguistic research is the notion of supraregionalisation by which is meant the rise of a non-local form of language used across a broad section of society and expressing its linguistic identity. He has also tracked the sociolinguistically motivated change in Dublin English over the past three decades and compiled a with appropriate software. In the area of Irish phonology, Hickey has devised a maximally concise system of description which captures many linguistically valid generalisations about the sound structure of that language. More generally he has been concerned with internal and external factors in language change, the course of such change and the complex of new dialect formation. Among his recent research foci have been life-span changes and ‘bad data’, fragmentary data from poorly documented sources which nonetheless can provide insights into language change.
Hickey, Raymond 1980. Satzstrukturen des Deutschen und Englischen, eine kontrastive Analyse im Rahmen der Dependenzgrammatik. . PhD thesis, University of Kiel.
Hickey, Raymond 2017. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, xxviii + 1005 pages.
Hickey, Raymond 2017. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, xxxii + 574 pages.
Hickey, Raymond and Elaine Vaughan 2017. Special issue of World Englishes 36.2. Malden, MA: Wiley.
Hickey, Raymond 2016. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 420 pages.
Hickey, Raymond 2015. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 483 pages.
Hickey, Raymond 2012. Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton, 503 pages.
Hickey, Raymond 2012. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 421 pages.
Hickey, Raymond 2011. Special issue of English Today 27.2, June 2011. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hickey, Raymond 2011. Uppsala: Uppsala University, 351 pages.
Hickey, Raymond 2010. Malden, MA: Wiley- Blackwell, 863 pages.
Hickey, Raymond 2010. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 426 pages.
Hickey, Raymond 2010. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 378 pages.
Hickey, Raymond 2004. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 712 pages.
Hickey, Raymond 2003. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 286 pages.
Hickey, Raymond 2002. Special volume of Language Sciences 24.3-4. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 302 pages.
Hickey, Raymond and Stanisław Puppel 1997. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2 vols., 2121 pages.
Hickey, Raymond, Merja Kytö, Ian Lancashire and Matti Rissanen 1997. Tracing the Trail of Time. Proceedings of the conference on diachronic corpora, Toronto, May 1995. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
