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 has two co-edited two volumes in press, both of which will be published by Oxford University Press in 2024: Historical and Sociolinguistic Approaches to French (co-edited with Janice Carruthers and Olivia Walsh) and The Oxford Handbook of the French Language (co-edited with Wendy Ayres-Bennett).
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 project will explore language in the news and the language of the news at significant moments of innovation and change.