Dr. James Stratton

James Stratton is a specialist in historical linguistics and language variation and change, with a focus on early and modern Germanic languages. At the historical level, he is interested in using variationist quantitative techniques to uncover patterns of variation in historical data. At the sociolinguistic level, he explores the factors that influence the linguistic choices we make in everyday conversation, examining the effects of social factors such as gender, age, education, identity, and ethnicity. His work combines variationist quantitative methods with corpus-based approaches to language variation and change. He has published in journals such as the Journal of Germanic Linguistics, Journal of Historical Linguistics, The Modern Language Journal, and Canadian Journal of Linguistics.

He also has a strong background in second language acquisition, receiving his Ph.D. in Linguistics from Purdue University where his doctoral work focused on applied historical linguistics. He examined empirically how knowledge of language history can be beneficial when learning historically related languages. Currently, he teaches courses on the history of the English language, language myths, and plans to offer courses on sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics, and the language, literature, and culture of Early Germanic people.