Paul Baker

In July 2019 he gave a speech about bias in the press at the British Parliament at the launch of the Centre for Media Monitoring.

A Polari exhibition at the John Rylands Library, Manchester used Paul Baker's research. The Polari Mission was a multi-disciplinary collaboration between artists and specialists in the fields of linguistics and computer science including Baker and Tim Greening-Jackson. The aim was to raise awareness about Polari, one of the world’s most endangered languages, a bold yet secretive part of Gay history.

In 2019, Baker's research on patient feedback on the National Health Service was reported in the Mail, Independent and Metro.

In 2018 he received a staff award for work on the language of Polari and its contribution to uncovering and highlighting LGBT heritage.

In an article, published on 27 July 2017 on BBC, Paul Baker said that "Layering upon layering of different influences ensures that there is no one single version of Polari but many versions and Polari has its own vocabulary for elements that mainstream society is not interested in."

On 6 November 2017 Baker was accepted as a Fellow of the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA).

In 2017 Baker's research on change in British and American English was reported in the Telegraph, Guardian and Mail. Baker noted how gradable adverbs like quite, rather and fairly have dramatically decreased in British English over the period 1931-2006, a phenomenon which seems to follow American English, which is more advanced.

Baker, P. (2016) 'The shapes of collocation.' International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 21(2): 139-164.

On 24 May 2010, Baker's article, Polari, a vibrant language born out of prejudice, was published in The Guardian on the language of Polari. Baker said that "I love Polari, but hopefully, the narrow-minded social conditions that led to its creation will never require anything like it to happen in this country again."

Baker, P.,Gabrielatos, C., Khosravinik, M., Krzyzanowski, M., McEnery, T and Wodak, R. (2008) 'A useful methodological synergy? Combining critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics to examine discourses of refugees and asylum seekers in the UK press.' Discourse and Society 19(3): 273-306.

Gabrielatos, C. and Baker, P. (2008) 'Fleeing, sneaking, flooding: a corpus analysis of discursive constructions of refugees and asylum seekers in the UK Press 1996-2005)' Journal of English Linguistics 36:1 pp. 5–38.

Since its creation in 2006, Baker has been the commissioning editor of the journal Corpora.

Baker, P. (2004) 'Querying keywords: questions of difference, frequency and sense in keywords analysis.' Journal of English Linguistics. 32: 4 pp 346–359.

On 8 November 2003, Scott Simon interviewed Baker on the language of Polari on the National Public Radio.

His PhD thesis was published in a book entitled Polari - The Lost Language of Gay Men (2002). A later book, Fabulosa (2019) updated the research for a non-academic audience. Baker regularly runs workshops in Polari at the Bishopsgate Institute, London.

Paul Baker (born 1972) is a professor and British linguist at the Department of Linguistics and English Language of Lancaster University, United Kingdom. His research focuses on corpus linguistics, critical discourse analysis, corpus-assisted discourse studies and language and identity. He is renowned for his research on the language of Polari.