Prof Janet Holmes

Professor of Linguistics,
School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies

BA Hons Leeds, MPhil Leeds, FRSNZ

Janet Holmes holds a personal Chair in Linguistics at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. She teaches sociolinguistics courses, specialising in language in the workplace, New Zealand English, and language and gender issues. She was Director of the project which produced the Wellington Corpus of Spoken New Zealand English which is available on CD-ROM, and she is currently Director of the Wellington Language in the Workplace project, an ongoing study of communication in the workplace which has described humour, management strategies, directives, and leadership in a wide range of New Zealand workplaces. (See www.victoria.ac.nz/lals/lwp). She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand in 1994. In the early 1990s, with Allan Bell and Mary Boyce, she conducted a social dialect survey in the Wellington area. Her publications include a textbook, An Introduction to Sociolinguistics, now in its third edition, a book of readings, Sociolinguistics, co-edited with John Pride, the first book of sociolinguistic and pragmatic articles on New Zealand English, New Zealand Ways of Speaking English, co-edited with Allan Bell, several  books on language and gender, including Gendered Talk at Work, Women, Men and Politeness, the Blackwell Handbook of Language and Gender, co-edited with Miriam Meyerhoff, and an edited collection of papers Gendered Speech in Social Context.   She has also published on a range of sociolinguistic and pragmatics topics, including New Zealand English, New Zealand women's usage, sexist language, pragmatic particles and hedges, compliments, apologies, disagreement, humour and small talk, and many other aspects of workplace discourse.

Current Research Projects

The Language in the Workplace (LWP) Project team has just completed a research project exploring cultural differences in workplace communication patterns. The research has focussed especially on similarities and differences between Māori and Pākehā leaders in Māori and Pākehā workplaces including the way that people manage meetings, the role of narrative in workplace interaction, and the functions of humour in different workplaces.  A book describing this research will be published by Oxford University Press.  The LWP team is currently engaged in pilot work for a project which follows skilled migrants into New Zealand workplaces in order to identify the communication issues they encounter as well as the attitudinal challenges which they have to seal with.

Selected Publications

• 2008 Introduction to Sociolinguistics . 3rd Edition. London: Longman. Pp. 406.
• 2006 Gendered Talk at Work: Constructing Gender Identity through Workplace Discourse. New York, Oxford: Blackwell. Pp. 251.
• 2003 with Maria Stubbe. Power and Politeness in the Workplace: a Sociolinguistic Analysis of Talk at Work . London: Pearson.
• 2003 Editor. Co-edited with Miriam Meyerhoff. The Handbook of Language and Gender. Oxford: Blackwell. Pp. 759.
• 2000 Editor. Gendered Speech in Social Context : Perspectives from Gown and Town. Wellington: Victoria University Press.

> View all publications by Janet Holmes

Research Areas

Janet supervises MA and PhD research in the areas of language and gender, workplace communication, and New Zealand English.

Administrative Responsibilities

• Acting Linguistics Programme Director
• LALS Advisory Committee
• Professorial Promotions Committee
• University Research Excellence Awards Committee