[3] Originally from Buckie, and speaking in that dialect,[4] Smith taught English in Athens[5] before studying for her MA in Linguistics at Durham University.
She is a PhD examiner for Newcastle University, Trinity College Dublin (2014) and the Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense.
[10] Research with Sali Tagliamonte of the University of Toronto covered variations in sociolinguistic specifics as well as North American variants.
[11] Her work with Sophie Holmes-Elliott of Queen Mary University of London was on certain sounds, and findings were presented at the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences.
[17] Smith has communicated in press and social media about her research, such as the computer modelling showing that local dialects are thriving[18] both in terms of words and sounds, and also sentence structures,[19] such that some Scots are considered bilingual.