Paul Baker (linguist)

Paul Baker (born 1972) is a British professor and 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 known for his research on the language of Polari. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and a Fellow of the Royal Society for Arts.

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

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

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."

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

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.

Research
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.

His research focuses on corpus linguistics, language and identity, and critical discourse analysis.

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 2017, Baker's research on change in British and American English was reported in The Telegraph and The Guardian. 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.

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

Articles
Baker has published over 30 articles in journals such as Discourse and Society, Journal of English Linguistics, Language Learning and Technology, Journal of Language and Politics, and Applied Linguistics. These include: