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 in 1980 and a PhD in Linguistics in 1987 (doctoral thesis: Metaphony and the Italian dialects: a study in morphologisation).
[1] Maiden specialises 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.
[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.