Raymond Hickey

Among the contributions he has made to linguistic research is the notion of supraregionalisation by which is meant the rise of a non-local form of language used across a broad section of society and expressing its linguistic identity. He has also tracked the sociolinguistically motivated change in Dublin English over the past three decades and compiled a Corpus of Irish English with appropriate software. In the area of Irish phonology, Hickey has devised a maximally concise system of description which captures many linguistically valid generalisations about the sound structure of that language. More generally he has been concerned with internal and external factors in language change, the course of such change and the complex of new dialect formation. Among his recent research foci have been life-span changes and ‘bad data’, fragmentary data from poorly documented sources which nonetheless can provide insights into language change.

Hickey's research also covers the wider field of varieties of English – in particular their historical development and spread overseas during the colonial period – language contact, areal linguistics and language typology, as well as the history of English, both the development of its phonology and the language in the eighteenth century which led to the standardisation of English.

Hickey studied German and Italian at Trinity College, Dublin and after attaining his M.A. moved to the University of Kiel, Germany, where he completed his PhD in 1980. He was awarded his second doctorate degree (German: Habilitation) in 1985 at the University of Bonn where he was appointed professor of English linguistics in 1987. In 1991 he moved to the University of Munich, then in 1993 to the University of Bayreuth and the following year to the University of Essen (since 2003 the University of Duisburg and Essen) where he has held the chair for General Linguistics and Varieties of English since. Hickey has been visiting professor at a number of international universities and is on the editorial board of several journals. His book publications have been and continue with major publishing houses such as Cambridge University Press, Wiley-Blackwell (Hoboken, New Jersey), Mouton de Gruyter (Berlin) and John Benjamins (Amsterdam).

Raymond Hickey (born 3 June 1954, Dublin) is an Irish linguist specialising in the English language in Ireland, especially in the capital Dublin, working within the sociolinguistic paradigm of language variation and change. Hickey has also worked on the Irish language, specifically the phonology of the modern language. For both Irish and English in Ireland he has carried out extensive fieldwork for over three decades.