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.

Deborah Cameron
Born	Deborah Jane Cameron (1958-11-10)10 November 1958 Glasgow, Scotland
Died	20 January 2026(2026-01-20) (aged 67)
Academic work
Main interests	Sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology
Notable works	The Myth of Mars and Venus: Do Men and Women Really Speak Different Languages?

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. ISBN 0-333-37077-5.
• Cameron, Deborah; Frazer, Elizabeth (1987). The lust to kill: a feminist investigation of sexual murder. New York: New York University Press. ISBN 9780814714157.
• Cameron, Deborah; Frazer, Elizabeth; Harvey, Penelope; Rampton, M.B.H.; Richardson, Kay (1992). Researching language: issues of power and method. London New York: Routledge. ISBN 9780415057226.
• Cameron, Deborah (1995). Verbal hygiene (1st ed.). London New York: Routledge. ISBN 9780415103558.
• Cameron, Deborah (2012). Verbal hygiene. Classics in Linguistics (Reprint ed.). London New York: Routledge. ISBN 9780415696005.
• Cameron, Deborah (2000). Good to talk? Living and working in a communication culture. London Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE. ISBN 9781412931557.
• Cameron, Deborah (2001). Working with spoken discourse. London Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE. ISBN 9780761957737.
• Cameron, Deborah; Block, David (2002). Globalization and language teaching. London New York: Routledge. ISBN 9780203193679.
• Cameron, Deborah; Markus, Thomas A. (2002). The words between the spaces: buildings and language. London New York: Routledge. ISBN 9780203360361.
• Cameron, Deborah; Kulick, Don (2003). Language and sexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780511791178.
• Cameron, Deborah; Kulick, Don (2006). The language and sexuality reader. London New York: Routledge. ISBN 9780203013373.
• Cameron, Deborah (2006). On language and sexual politics. London New York: Routledge. ISBN 9780415373432.
• Cameron, Deborah (2007). The myth of Mars and Venus: Do men and women really speak different languages?. Oxford New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780199214471.
• Cameron, Deborah; Scanlon, Joan (2010). The Trouble & Strife reader. London New York: Bloomsbury Academic. ISBN 9781849660129.
• Cameron, Deborah (2012). More heat than light?: Sex-difference science & the study of language. Vancouver: Ronsdale Press. ISBN 9781553802211.
• Cameron, Deborah; Panović, Ivan (2014). Working with written discourse. London Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE. ISBN 9781446267226.
• Cameron, Deborah; Shaw, Sylvia (2016). Gender, Power, and Political Speech: Women and language in the 2015 UK General Election. London: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-1-137-58751-0.
• Cameron, Deborah (2025). The Rise of Dogwhistle Politics. Cambridge: Polity Press. ISBN 9-781509-569007.

Chapters in books

• Cameron, Deborah; Frazer, Elizabeth (1996), "The murderer as misogynist?", in Jackson, Stevi; Scott, Sue (eds.), Feminism and sexuality: a reader, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 207–215, ISBN 9780231107082.
• Cameron, Deborah; Frazer, Elizabeth (1996), "On the question of pornography and sexual violence: moving beyond cause and effect", in Jackson, Stevi; Scott, Sue (eds.), Feminism and sexuality: a reader, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 321–332, ISBN 9780231107082.
• Cameron, Deborah (2011), ""The virtues of good prose": verbal hygiene and the movement", in Leader, Zachary (ed.), The movement reconsidered: essays on Larkin, Amis, Gunn, Davie, and their contemporaries, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 139–154, ISBN 9780199601844.

Journal articles

• Cameron, Deborah (July 1990). "Ten years on: "Compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian existence"". Women: A Cultural Review. 1 (1): 35–37. doi:10.1080/09574049008578015. (See also: Rich, Adrienne (Summer 1980). "Compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian existence". Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. 5 (4): 631–660. doi:10.1086/493756. JSTOR 3173834. S2CID 143604951. and Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence)

• Cameron, Deborah (May 2010). "Sex/gender, language and the new biologism". Applied Linguistics. 31 (2): 173–192. doi:10.1093/applin/amp022.
• Cameron, Deborah (February 2011). "Evolution, science and the study of literature: A critical response". Language and Literature. 20 (1): 59–72. doi:10.1177/0963947010391126. S2CID 147650548.
• Cameron, Deborah (2013). "The one, the many and the other: representing mono- and multilingualism in post-9/11 verbal hygiene". Critical Multilingualism Studies. 1 (2): 59–77.
• Cameron, Deborah; Holoshitz, Tamar (June 2014). "The linguistic representation of sexual violence in conflict settings". Gender and Language. 8 (2): 169–184. doi:10.1558/genl.v8i2.169.
• Cameron, Deborah (2021) "Women, Civility, and the Language of Politics: Realities and representations" The Political Quarterly 1-7

Further reading

• Benwell, Bethan (December 2011). "Masculine identity and identification as ethnomethodological phenomena: revisiting Cameron and Kulick". Gender and Language. 5 (2): 187–211. doi:10.1558/genl.v5i2.187.

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.