LINGUIST List 28.4926
Sat Nov 25 2017
All: Obituary: Jim Milroy, 1933-2017
Editor for this issue: Kenneth Steimel <kenlinguistlist.org>
Date: 25-Nov-2017
From: Paul Foulkes <paul.foulkes
york.ac.uk>
Subject: Obituary: Jim Milroy, 1933-2017
E-mail this message to a friend We are sad to report the passing of Jim Milroy on 12 November 2017.
James Robert Dunlop Milroy was born in Portpatrick in south-west Scotland. The son of a farmer, as a child he lived in Scotland, North Wales (where he learned Welsh) and Surrey. This experience of hearing and acquiring Welsh and the local accents of his childhood kindled his interest in language and dialects.
Jim was a successful and highly respected academic linguist. As a graduate student, he went on a Fulbright scholarship to Washington University, St Louis, and spent the early years of his career teaching at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He loved the USA, finding the people warm and good company, and was happy to return there many years later. In the early 1960s he taught at the Universities of Leeds and Manchester, where he met his wife Lesley. They married in 1965 and three sons arrived in quick succession. Jim moved to Queen’s University Belfast where he and Lesley carried out pioneering work in sociolinguistics. The tight-knit communities of Belfast in the 1970s provided excellent laboratories for this research. He was very much at home in Belfast, and particularly loved to be close to the beauty of the west of Ireland. In 1981, he moved to take the Chair of Linguistics at the University of Sheffield, and later continued research with Lesley at Newcastle University and then for another decade at the University of Michigan before retiring to Deddington, Oxfordshire, in 2005. He remained Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sheffield, and latterly Fellow of the Faculty of Linguistics and Philology, University of Oxford.
Jim’s work in sociolinguistics and language change remains immensely influential. He is perhaps best known for his books "Authority in Language "(1985, co-authored with Lesley, and now in its 4th edition), "Linguistic variation and change: on the historical sociolinguistics of English" (1992), and "Real
English: the grammar of English dialects in the British Isles" (1993, also co-authored with Lesley). Jim was also instrumental in establishing the Sociolinguistics Symposium, now the largest and most important international event in the field. He remained active in the field after retirement, continuing to publish, teaching summer schools, and attending conferences.
Those who knew Jim will remember him as an exceptionally erudite and eloquent scholar. He was modest and self-deprecating about his contribution to the field, and generous with his time and support of colleagues and students. He was particularly supportive of young people, having little time for those who were overly critical of them and recognising that each generation confronts different issues. Jim was gentle and humorous, making him great fun to be around.
He will be very much missed by Lesley, his sons David, Andrew, and Richard, his grandchildren James, Maddy, Flo, Meera, Georgia and Becca, and by his old colleagues and friends.
His memorial service will be held at Deddington Parish Church on Wednesday 6 December at 2.30 pm.
If desired, donations for Katharine House Hospice can be made via their website (
https://www.khh.org.uk/donate/; please indicate that this is in memory of Jim). Donations may also be sent c/o Humphris Funerals (
www.humphrisfunerals.co.uk).
Linguistic Field(s): Not Applicable
Page Updated: 25-Nov-2017