Gillian Sankoff is a Canadian-American sociolinguist, and professor emerita of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. She is known for her work on Montréal French, on pidgin and creole languages, and on how speakers' use of language changes over the course of their lifespans. In 1986 she received a Guggenheim fellowship.She was married to sociologist Erving Goffman from 1981 to his death in 1982, and subsequently married sociolinguist William Labov in 1993.