Martin Maiden (born Southampton, UK, 20 May 1957) is Statutory Professor of the Romance Languages at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford.
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, having studied French, Italian, Romance philology, and general linguistics, in 1980 and a PhD in Linguistics in 1987 (doctoral thesis: Metaphony and the Italian dialects: a study in morphologisation). He taught Italian at the University of Bath (1982–1989) and subsequently became a lecturer in Romance Philology at the University of Cambridge (1989–1996), where he was a Fellow of Downing College.[1] In 1996 he took up his position in Oxford.
Since 2025 he has held Romanian as well as British citizenship.
Maiden specializes 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. He has published some 150 articles and book chapters, and edited or authored several books, in these areas and the grammar of Italian. He has also co-edited volumes on morphological theory with reference to Romance languages.