Suzanne Romaine graduated from Bryn Mawr College with an A.B. magna cum laude, and completed her MLitt at the University of Edinburgh, and PhD at the University of Birmingham. Prior to becoming Merton Professor of English Language at the University of Oxford in 1984, she was Senior research scientist in linguistic anthropology at the Max Planck Institut für Psycholinguistik in Nijmegen, and Lecturer in linguistics at the University of Birmingham. She has received honorary doctorates from the University of Uppsala and the University of Tromsø and has held a variety of scholarships and visiting fellowships at other universities including the Rotary International Foundation fellowship, the Canada Commonwealth Scholarship, Kerstin Hesselgren Professor for outstanding women in the Humanities, the Royden B. Davis Chair in Interdisciplinary Studies at Georgetown University, She was a resident fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford and was elected Fellow of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters. She was a member of the Expert Group that produced UNESCO’s position paper on Education in a Multilingual World(Paris, 2003), and wrote the backgrounder paper on Languages and Cultural Identities for UNESCO’s report Investing in Cultural Diversity and Intercultural Dialogue (Paris, 2009). Her research interests include linguistic diversity, multilingualism, language death, language revitalization, language change and contact.