MICRO-BIO

• Professor Vivian de Klerk obtained her BA (Hons) and MA degrees cum laude from Rhodes and a PhD from UCT. She has been Professor and Head of the Department of English Language and Linguistics at Rhodes University since 1991, and has served as Deputy...More

  Professor Vivian de Klerk obtained her BA (Hons) and MA degrees cum laude from Rhodes and a PhD from UCT. She has been Professor and Head of the Department of English Language and Linguistics at Rhodes University since 1991, and has served as Deputy Dean of Humanities (6 years) and University Public Orator (4 years). On a national level, she served as President of the Linguistics Society of Southern Africa from 1995-2002, she was the ministerial appointee on the South African Geographical Names Council till 2006, and she serves on the boards of the South African Academy of Science and the English National Language Body. In addition, she chaired the Provincial Language Council for Eastern Cape Province from 1998 - 2003, and serves on the editorial boards of English World Wide and the Southern African Journal of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, and on the Boards of the Institute for the Study of English in Africa (ISEA), the Dictionary Unit for South African English and the Grahamstown Foundation. She is currently a rated NRF researcher, and research interests over the years have included issues in language and gender, personal naming practices, and language shift on which she has over 80 peer-reviewed articles published in scholarly journals, plus 2 books. Her work on a spoken corpus of Black South African English, explores the linguistic characteristics of this emergent variety of English in South Africa. In 2007 she moved from academia to university administration, and she is now the Dean of Students at Rhodes University, tasked with driving transformation in the institution. Less

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