Before becoming professor of
sociolinguistics at the
University of Essex he taught in the Department of Linguistic Science at the
University of Reading from 1970 to 1986. He was professor of English language and
linguistics at the
University of Lausanne, Switzerland, from 1993 to 1998, and then at the
University of Fribourg, also in Switzerland, from which he retired in September 2005, and where he is now Professor Emeritus of English Linguistics.
He is an honorary Professor of Sociolinguistics at the
University of East Anglia, in Norwich, England. On 2 June 1995 he received an
honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Humanities at
Uppsala University,
Sweden.[3] He also has honorary doctorates from
UEA; La Trobe University, Melbourne; the University of Patras, Greece; and the University of British Columbia, Vancouver.
He has carried out linguistic fieldwork in
Britain,
Greece and
Norway, and has lectured in most
European countries, Canada, the United States,
Colombia, Australia,
New Zealand,
India,
Thailand, Hong Kong,
Fiji,
Malawi and Japan. Peter Trudgill has been the president of the Friends of
Norfolk Dialect society since its inception in 1999.[4] and contributes a regular column on language and languages in Europe to the New European newspaper.
Trudgill is one of the first to apply
Laboviansociolinguistic methodology in the UK,[5][6] and to provide a framework for studying dialect contact phenomena.[7]
He has carried out studies on
rhoticity in English, tracking trends in British rock music for decades; the Beatles’ decreased pronunciation of Rs over the course of the 1960s [8][9] He was a member of the committee for England and Wales for the
Atlas Linguarum Europae in the 1970s, doing some research on the East Anglian sites.[10]
Trudgill is also the author of Chapter 1 ("The Meanings of Words Should Not be Allowed to Vary or Change") of the popular linguistics book "Language Myths" that he co-edited.
^Hanley, Lynsey (16 May 2016).
"Why are schools trying to wipe out regional accents?". The Guardian. UK. Retrieved 10 May 2021. sociolinguist Peter Trudgill noted as long ago as the 1970s that language use had begun to change, and to some extent to level out, in smaller towns due to the undue influence of larger, more culturally dominant cities... The urge to devalue regional accents is part of a deliberate process.
^Aveyard, Edward (2023). "The Atlas Linguarum Europae in Great Britain and the Republic of Ireland". Transactions of the Yorkshire Dialect Society: 3–11.