Richard Coates (born 16 April 1949, in Grimsby, Lincolnshire, and educated at Wintringham School) is an English linguist.
From 1977 to 2006 he taught at the University of Sussex, where he served as Professor of Linguistics (1991–2006) and as Dean of the School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences (1998–2003).
From 2002 to 2008, he was secretary of the International Council of Onomastic Sciences, a body devoted to the promotion of the study of names, and elected as one of its two vice-presidents from 2011 to 2017.
His main academic interests are proper names (both from the historical and the theoretical perspective), historical linguistics in general, the philology of the Germanic, Romance and Celtic languages, regional variation in language, and local history.
He is editor of the Survey of English Place-Names for Hampshire and was principal investigator of the AHRC-funded project Family Names of the United Kingdom (FaNUK), running from 2010 to 2016, of which Patrick Hanks was lead researcher.
He has written books on the names of the Channel Islands, the local place-names of St Kilda, Hampshire and Sussex, the dialect of Sussex, and, with Andrew Breeze, on Celtic place-names in England, as well as over 500 academic articles, notes, and collections on related topics.
[1][2][3][4] He is also the author of Word Structure, a student's introduction to linguistic morphology (Routledge), and of online resources on Shakespeare's character-names and on the place-names of Hayling Island.
with John Lyons, Margaret Deuchar and Gerald Gazdar) New horizons in linguistics 2.
1988 Toponymic topics: essays on the early toponymy of the British Isles.
Lewiston, New York: Edwin Mellen Press (ISBN 9780199677764 Celtic Studies 1); pp.
1991 The ancient and modern names of the Channel Islands: a linguistic history.
Locus focus: forum of the Sussex place-names net (7 vols, 14 issues).
Nottingham: English Place-Name Society (supplementary series 1); pp.
2010 A place-name history of the parishes of Rottingdean and Ovingdean in Sussex (including Woodingdean and Saltdean).
Nottingham: English Place-Name Society (Regional series 2); pp.
2010 The traditional dialect of Sussex: a history, description, selected texts, bibliography and discography.
with Patrick Hanks and Peter McClure) The Oxford dictionary of family names in the United Kingdom.
2019 Places, names and history in north-west Bristol: Shirehampton, Avonmouth and King’s Weston.
with Luisa Caiazzo and Maoz Azaryahu) Naming, identity and tourism.