Steve Thorne is a British

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 linguist and writer.

Born in Birmingham

Birmingham

Birmingham is a city and metropolitan borough in the West Midlands of England. It is the most populous British city outside the capital London, with a population of 1,036,900 , and lies at the heart of the West Midlands conurbation, the second most populous urban area in the United Kingdom with a...

, England

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

, Thorne graduated from the University of Birmingham with a First Class Honours degree in English

English studies

English studies is an academic discipline that includes the study of literatures written in the English language , English linguistics English studies is an academic discipline that includes the study of literatures written in the English language (including literatures from the U.K., U.S.,...

 in 2000 and a PhD

PHD

PHD may refer to:*Ph.D., a doctorate of philosophy*Ph.D. , a 1980s British group*PHD finger, a protein sequence*PHD Mountain Software, an outdoor clothing and equipment company*PhD Docbook renderer, an XML renderer...

 in Linguistics

Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....

 in 2003. His 2003 doctoral thesis, Birmingham English: A Sociolinguistic Study, analyses attitudes towards the variety of British English

British English

British English, or English , is the broad term used to distinguish the forms of the English language used in the United Kingdom from forms used elsewhere...

 popularly known as Brummie

Brummie

Brummie is a colloquial term for the inhabitants, accent and dialect of Birmingham, England, as well as being a general adjective used to denote a connection with the city, locally called Brum...

.

He has published widely in the field of attitudes towards language varieties and also specialises in dialectology

Dialectology

Dialectology is the scientific study of linguistic dialect, a sub-field of sociolinguistics. It studies variations in language based primarily on geographic distribution and their associated features...

, sociolinguistics

Sociolinguistics

Sociolinguistics is the descriptive study of the effect of any and all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way language is used, and the effects of language use on society...

 and the language of the military. He currently lectures for both the Open University

Open University

The Open University is a distance learning and research university founded by Royal Charter in the United Kingdom...

 and Birmingham Metropolitan College

Birmingham Metropolitan College

Birmingham Metropolitan College is a further and higher education college with eight campuses distributed within Birmingham, England. The college was created in August 2009 as a result of the amalgamation of Matthew Boulton College and Sutton Coldfield College...

and works as a freelance linguistics consultant for local and national multimedia.

External links

• Review of The Language of War
• "Brummie is Beautiful"
• "Brummie is Beautiful" BBC piece
• http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/2004_07.html
• http://www.cilip.org.uk/aboutcilip/newsandpressreleases/archive2002/news021009b.htm