Deborah Cameron (linguist)

Deborah Jane Cameron (10 November 1958 – 20 January 2026) was a British linguist and feminist who held the Rupert Murdoch Professorship in Language and Communication at Worcester College, Oxford University.

Cameron was mainly interested in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. A large part of her academic research was focused on the relationship of language to gender and sexuality. She wrote the book The Myth of Mars And Venus: Do Men and Women Really Speak Different Languages?, which was published in 2007.

Life and career

Before her post at Oxford University, Cameron taught at the Roehampton Institute of Higher Education, The College of William & Mary in Virginia, Strathclyde University in Glasgow and the Institute of Education in London.

Cameron died from pancreatic cancer on 20 January 2026, at the age of 67.

Selected bibliography

Books

• Cameron, Deborah (1985). Feminism and Linguistic Theory. London Basingstoke: Macmillan. .
• Cameron, Deborah; Shaw, Sylvia (2016). Gender, Power, and Political Speech: Women and language in the 2015 UK General Election. London: Palgrave Macmillan. .
• Cameron, Deborah (2025). The Rise of Dogwhistle Politics. Cambridge: Polity Press. .

Chapters in books

Journal articles

• (See also: and Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence)

• Cameron, Deborah (2021) "Women, Civility, and the Language of Politics: Realities and representations" The Political Quarterly 1-7

Further reading

References

External links

• Deborah Cameron, Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics at Oxford
• Deborah Cameron's academia.edu page--contains links to a number of her writings
• Language: A Feminist Guide, her blog
• Extracts from her book "The Myth of Mars and Venus" (review):
• "What language barrier?", The Guardian.
• "Speak up, I can't hear you", The Guardian.