Martin Maiden

This article is about the language scholar. For the Oxford microbiologist, see Martin C. J. Maiden.

Martin Maiden (born Southampton, UK, 20 May 1957) is Statutory Professor of the Romance Languages at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford.

Maiden was educated at King Edward VI School, Southampton, and then at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he received a BA in Modern and Medieval Languages, having studied French, Italian, Romance philology, and general linguistics, in 1980 and a PhD in Linguistics in 1987 (doctoral thesis: Metaphony and the Italian dialects: a study in morphologisation). He taught Italian at the University of Bath (1982–1989) and subsequently became a lecturer in Romance Philology at the University of Cambridge (1989–1996), where he was a Fellow of Downing College.^[1] In 1996 he took up his position in Oxford.

Since 2025 he has held Romanian as well as British citizenship.

Maiden specializes in the history and structure of the Romance languages, especially varieties of Romanian, Dalmatian, Italian and other Italo-Romance dialects, historical linguistics, morphology, and dialectology. He has published some 150 articles and book chapters, and edited or authored several books, in these areas and the grammar of Italian. He has also co-edited volumes on morphological theory with reference to Romance languages.

Honours

He has been a Fellow of the British Academy since 2003.^[2] He holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Bucharest (2013),^[3] and in 2013 was also appointed to the rank of "Commander" in the Romanian National Order of Faithful Service.^[4] In 2018 he was elected a Member of Academia Europaea^[5] and in 2019 he was made an Honorary Fellow of Downing College.^[6] In 2019 he was also appointed Membro corrispondente of the Italian Accademia della Crusca.^[7]

Selected major works

Maiden is also a contributor to all of the edited volumes cited

• 1991 Interactive Morphonology. Metaphony in Italy. London: Routledge.
• 1995 A Linguistic History of Italian. London: Longman.
• 1997 (edited with M. Parry) The Dialects of Italy. London: Routledge.
• 1998 Storia linguistica dell’italiano, Bologna: il Mulino.
• 2007 (with C. Robustelli) A Reference Grammar of Modern Italian. London: Hodder Arnold.
• 2011 (edited with J. C. Smith and A. Ledgeway) The Cambridge History of the Romance Languages I Structures. Cambridge: CUP.
• 2011 (edited with J. C. Smith, M. Goldbach and M.-O. Hinzelin) Morphological Autonomy. Perspectives from Romance Inflectional Morphology. Oxford: OUP.
• 2013 (edited with J. C. Smith and A. Ledgeway) The Cambridge History of the Romance Languages II Contexts. Cambridge: CUP.
• 2016 (edited with A. Ledgeway) The Oxford Guide to the Romance Languages. Oxford: OUP.
• 2018 The Romance Verb. Morphomic Structure and Diachrony. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• 2020 (edited with S. Wolfe) Variation and Change in Gallo-Romance Grammar. Oxford: OUP
• 2021 (with A. Dragomirescu, G. Pană Dindelegan, O. Uță Bărbulescu, and R. Zafiu) The Oxford History of Romanian Morphology. Oxford: OUP
• 2022 (edited with A. Ledgeway) The Cambridge Handbook of Romance Linguistics. Cambridge: CUP