James Walker is Professor of Language Diversity and Director of the Centre for Research on Language Diversity. His research interests include variation at all levels of language, from phonetics/phonology through morphology and syntax to discourse-pragmatics. He has conducted research on Sango (Central African Republic), the history of African American English, the English spoken in Quebec (Canada) and Bequia (St Vincent and the Grenadines), ethnolinguistic variation in Toronto and Sweden, and Brazilian Portuguese.

At the University of Toronto he completed a BA in Linguistics (1989) and an MA in Anthropology (1991) before working in information development at IBM Canada (1992-1995). He completed an MA (1995) and PhD (2000) at the University of Ottawa. From 2000 he held positions of Assistant and Associate Professor of Linguistics at York University (Toronto), where he was promoted to Full Professor in 2014. In 2017 he accepted his current position at La Trobe University.