Rate My Professor Jennifer Smith

Throughout her career, Professor Smith has led several high-profile projects funded by the ESRC, AHRC, and British Academy, such as "One speaker, two dialects: bidialectalism across the generations in a Scottish community" (ESRC, 2013-2016) and "Bidialectalism or dialect death?" (British Academy, 2009-2010). She created landmark digital resources: The Scots Syntax Atlas (AHRC, 2015-2019) and Speak for Yersel: Mapping Scots in the 21st Century Classroom (AHRC, 2021-2022), which democratize access to dialect data across Scotland. Her prolific scholarship includes over 20 peer-reviewed articles in top journals like Language and English Language and Linguistics, such as "Tracking linguistic change in childhood: transmission, incrementation, and vernacular reorganization" (Language, 2022), "English contracted negation revisited: evidence from varieties of Scots" (Language, 2023), and the monograph Sociolinguistic Variation in Children's Language: Acquiring Community Norms (2019). In recognition of her contributions, she was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 2025 and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Her work profoundly impacts the field by illuminating social and biological drivers of language change and fostering public engagement with sociolinguistic research.