Research Areas

History of the French language; Variation and change in contemporary French; Translation studies; Comparative Romance linguistics; History of the Italian language; Language of the media; History of the press; Syntactic change; Speech reporting; Contact linguistics

Biography

Mairi McLaughlin is Professor in the Department of French and an Affiliated Member of the Departments of Linguistics and Italian Studies at UC Berkeley. She specializes in French/Romance Linguistics and in Translation Studies. She has published extensively on language contact in French and Romance, on the language of the media, and on journalistic and literary translation. She has a particular interest in the language of the media, especially the role that it plays in language variation and change, the use that is made of reported speech, and the linguistic and textual effects of news translation.

Mairi’s first book, Syntactic Borrowing in Contemporary French: A Linguistic Analysis of News Translation was published by Legenda in 2011 and her second book, La Presse française historique: histoire d’un genre et histoire de la langue, was published by Garnier in 2021. 

She published a digital edition of the first periodical devoted to the French language itself, François-Urbain Domergue's Journal de la langue françoise, soit exacte, soit ornée (1784-1795) (McLaughlin 2022) and a critical paper edition of the same periodical is forthcoming with Garnier. Mairi is co-editor (with Wendy Ayres-Bennett) of The Oxford Handbook of the French Language which was published by Oxford University Press in 2024. She is also co-editor (with Janice Carruthers and Olivia Walsh) of the volume Historical and Sociolinguistic Approaches to French which was also published by Oxford University Press in 2024.

Mairi is currently involved in a series of collaborative projects involving a mixture of quantitative and qualitative research. These include studies of contemporary news translation with Léa Huotari and Justin Davidson, a study of seventeenth-century news discourse in English and French with Nicholas Brownlees, and a collaborative creative project with the poet, scholar, and translator Vincent Broqua.

Mairi’s next major project will explore language in the news and the language of the news at significant moments of innovation and change in the French press. This includes the explosion of handwritten news to circumvent censorship in eighteenth-century France; the development of the first periodicals devoted to language itself starting with the Journal de la langue françoise in 1784; and the French-language press in America in the long nineteenth century.

Selected Publications

The Oxford Handbook of the French Language, co-edited with Wendy Ayres-Bennett, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024.

Historical and Sociolinguistic Approaches to French, co-edited with Janice Carruthers and Olivia Walsh, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024.

“French and its Varieties: Disciplinary Perspectives and New Horizons”, co-authored with Wendy-Ayres-Bennett, in The Oxford Handbook of the French Language, ed. by Wendy Ayres-Bennett and Mairi McLaughlin, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024, pp. 1-28.

“Morphology and Syntax” in The Oxford Handbook of the French Language, ed. by Wendy Ayres-Bennett and Mairi McLaughlin, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024, pp. 65-102.

“New Directions in the History and Sociolinguistics of French”, co-authored with Janice Carruthers and Olivia Walsh, in Historical and Sociolinguistic Approaches to French, ed. by Janice Carruthers, Mairi McLaughlin and Olivia Walsh, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024, pp. 1-24.

“Women and Language in the Journal de la langue françoise (1784-1795)”, in Historical and Sociolinguistic Approaches to French, ed. by Janice Carruthers, Mairi McLaughlin and Olivia Walsh, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024, pp. 121-143.

“Translation and the Press”, co-authored with Nicholas Brownlees, in The Edinburgh History of the British and Irish Press, Vol I 1640-1800, ed. by Nicholas Brownlees, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023, pp. 384-403.

Journal de la langue françoise, soit exacte soit ornée (1784-1795) by François-Urbain Domergue, in Grand Corpus des grammaires françaises, des remarques et des traités sur la langue (XIVe-XVIIIe s.), Paris: Garnier, 2022.

The Future of Translation in Higher Education (2022, Special issue of L2 Journal 14/2) https://escholarship.org/uc/uccllt_l2/14/2

“La traductologie de corpus et la traduction journalistique historique”, META: Journal des traducteurs, special issue: ‘Exploring New Methods in Quantitative Translation Studies’, ed. by Meng Ji and Michael Oakes, 67(1), 170-189, 2022.

La Presse française historique: Histoire d’un genre et histoire de la langue, Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2021.

“La Représentation de l’oral dans la Gazette d’Amsterdam à la fin du XVIIIe siècle”, Langages, special issue: ‘L’oral représenté en diachronie et en synchronie: que nous apprend-il sur l’oral spontané?’, ed. by Florence Lefeuvre and Gabriella Parussa, 217, 2020, pp. 133-146.

“When Romance meets English”, in Manual of Romance Sociolinguistics, ed. by Wendy Ayres-Bennett and Janice Carruthers, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018, pp. 644-73.

“Why Retranslate the Classics? Griselda in French from the Renaissance to the Twentieth Century”, co-authored with Linda Louie and Diana Thow, in Cultural Reception, Translation and Transformation from Medieval to Modern Italy. Essays in Honor of Martin McLaughlin, ed. by Guido Bonsaver, Brian Richardson and Giuseppe Stellardi, Oxford: Legenda, 2017, pp. 52-68.

“Prolégomènes à l’étude des idéologies et attitudes linguistiques dans la presse périodique sous l’Ancien Régime”, Circula : revue d’idéologies linguistiques, 1, 2015, pp. 4-25.

“Etat présent: Translation Studies”, French Studies, 68(iii), 2014, pp. 377-85.

“Le Genre sexué et le discours rapporté dans les dépêches d’agences de presse”, in Discours rapporté, genre(s) et médias, ed. by Françoise Sullet-Nylander, Malin Roitman, Juan-Manuel Lopez-Muñoz and Laurence Rosier, Stockholm: US-AB, 2014, pp. 145-59.

“News Translation as a Source of Syntactic Borrowing in Italian”, The Italianist, 33(iii), 2013, pp. 443-63.

“L’Oralisation et le discours rapporté dans les dépêches d’agences de presse”, Le discours et la langue, 2.2, 2012, pp. 89-98.

Syntactic Borrowing in Contemporary French: A Linguistic Analysis of News Translation, Oxford: Legenda, 2011.