Jean Aitchison is the Rupert Murdoch Professor of Language and Communication at the University of Oxford. In her research, she is concerned with the mental lexicon, language change and the language of the media. She is the author of several books, including Language Change: Progress or decay? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd edn 1991), Words in the Mind: An introduction to the mental lexicon (Oxford: Blackwell, 2nd edn 1994), The Language Web: The power and problem of words (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
John Algeo is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Georgia. He is co-author of Origins and Development of the English Language (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 4th edn 1993) and author of Fifty Years among the New Words (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Editor of volume 6 of the Cambridge History of the English Language on English in North America, he is past President of the American Dialect Society and of the Dictionary Society of North America. For ten years he was editor of American Speech, the journal of the American Dialect Society, and for ten years with his wife Adele wrote the quarterly column ‘Among the New Words’ for that same journal.
Lars-Gunnar Andersson, Professor of Modern Swedish at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, received his Ph.D. in linguistics in 1975 from the University of Gothenburg, where he also conducted his undergraduate studies. He has lectured at several universities and attended conferences in Europe, the USA and southern Africa. He has done most of his linguistic work in syntax, semantics, typology and sociolinguistics. He has co-written two books on the local dialect of Gothenburg and is also co-author, with two others, of Logic in Linguistics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). Together with Peter Trudgill he has written Bad Language (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), and together with Tore Janson, Languages in Botswana (Gaborone: Longman Botswana, 1997). He is also a columnist on a daily newspaper in Gothenburg.
Laurie Bauer is Reader in Linguistics at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. A graduate of the University of Edinburgh, he is the author of many books and articles on word-formation, international varieties of English and, most recently, language change in current English. His books include English Word-Formation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), Introducing Linguistic Morphology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1988) and Watching English Change (London and New York: Longman, 1994).
Winifred Bauer is a New Zealander who for over twenty years has devoted her research to the Maori language, and she has a number of publications in that field, including Maori (London and New York: Routledge, 1993) and the Reed Reference Grammar of Maori (Auckland: Reed, 1997). She has taught at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in England and Odense University in Denmark. She is an Honorary Research Fellow at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.
Edward Carney read English at University College, London. He spent most of the 1950s in Sweden, teaching in the Department of English at the University of Lund. In the early 1960s he joined the newly established Department of Linguistics in the University of Manchester, where he eventually became Senior Lecturer in Phonetics. At present he is a Senior Research Fellow in the department. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists.
J. K. Chambers is Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Toronto. As a child, he braved the howling winds on the tundra to reach the warmth of the pot-bellied stove and teacher in the one-room schoolhouse in Stoney Creek. He has written extensively about Canadian English, beginning with ‘Canadian Raising’ in 1973 and including Canadian English: Origins and structures (Toronto: Methuen, 1975), the first book on the topic. More general research includes studies of dialect acquisition, dialect topography and linguistic variation. He is co-author (with Peter Trudgill) of Dialectology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd edn 1997) and author of Sociolinguistic Theory: Language variation and its social significance (Oxford and New York: Blackwell, 1995).
Jenny Cheshire is Professor of Linguistics at Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London. She has researched and published on language variation and change, modern English syntax, and different aspects of language in society. Recent editions include English around the World: Sociolinguistic perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) and, with Dieter Stein, Taming the Vernacular: From dialect to written standard language (London and New York: Longman, 1997). She is currently writing a book on the syntax of spoken English and co-directing, with Paul Kerswill, a research project on dialect levelling in three English cities.
John H. Esling is Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada. He is Secretary of the International Phonetic Association (http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/IPA/ipa.html), and his research is on the auditory categorization of voice quality and on the phonetic production of laryngeal and pharyngeal speech sounds. He is the author of the University of Victoria Phonetic Database on CD-ROM and has participated in the development of several phonetics teaching and speech analysis software programs.
Nicholas Evans is Reader in Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics and Applied Linguistics at the University of Melbourne. Since 1980 he has worked extensively on a range of Aboriginal languages spoken in Queensland and the Northern Territory, publishing numerous articles, a grammar and dictionary of Kayardild and (with Patrick McConvell) editing a book on linguistics and prehistory in Australia. At present he is writing a grammar of Mayali and a book on polysemy (multiple meaning) and meaning change in Australian languages.
Howard Giles (Ph.D., D.Sc, University of Bristol) is Professor and Chair of Communication at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he also holds affiliated professorial positions in psychology and in linguistics. He is founding editor of both the Journal of Language and Social Psychology and the Journal of Asian Pacific Communication. Currently, he is President-Elect of the International Communication Association and International Association for Language and Social Psychology. His interdisciplinary research interests span the following areas of language and intergroup communication: language attitudes, ethnolinguistics, speech accommodation, intergenerational communication across cultures and police–citizen interactions.
Ray Harlow trained initially as a classicist in New Zealand and Switzerland, turning to Polynesian linguistics some twenty years ago. He is now Associate Professor in Linguistics at the University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand. From its establishment by parliament in 1987 until 1993, he was a member of Te Taura Whiri i te Reo Maori (The Maori Language Commission). Recent publications and writings that relate to the topic of his contribution to this volume include: ‘Lexical expansion in Maori’ in Journal of the Polynesian Society, 102.1 (1993), ΡΡ·99–107; ‘A science and maths terminology for Maori’ in SAMEpapers (Hamilton, New Zealand: University of Waikato, 1993, pp. 124–37); and a commissioned report to the Maori Language Commission on a comparison of the status of Maori in New Zealand and Romansh in Switzerland (1994).
Janet Holmes holds a personal Chair in Linguistics at Victoria University of Wellington, where she teaches linguistics and sociolinguistics courses. Her publications include a textbook, An Introduction to Sociolinguistics (London and New York: Longman, 1992) and the first book of sociolinguistic and pragmatic articles on New Zealand English, New Zealand Ways of Speaking English (Clevedon and Philadelphia: Multilingual Matters, 1990), co-edited with Allan Bell. She has published on a range of topics, including New Zealand English, language and gender, sexist language, pragmatic particles and hedges, compliments and apologies. Her most recent book is Women, Men and Politeness (London and New York: Longman, 1995).
Anthony Lodge was formerly Professor of French at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and is now Professor of French Language and Linguistics at the University of St Andrews. He has a strong interest in French language-teaching, but his work has focused primarily on the history of the French language, culminating in French: From dialect to standard (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), a general overview of the relationship between language and society in France since Roman times. He has recently co-authored a general introduction to the linguistic analysis of French in Exploring the French Language (London: Arnold, 1997). He is joint editor of the Journal of French Language Studies (published by Cambridge University Press).
James Milroy is Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sheffield and now teaches at the University of Michigan. His publications include The Language of Gerard Manley Hopkins (London: André Deutsch, 1977), Regional Accents of English: Belfast (Belfast: Blackstaff, 1981), Linguistic Variation and Change (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992) and, with Lesley Milroy, Authority in Language (London: Routledge, 1985,2nd edn 1991). He has also written a large number of papers on sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, Middle English and Old Norse. He has recently been involved in collaborative work based in Newcastle on phonological variation and change in present-day English and is preparing a manuscript for Longman on social dialectology and language change.
Lesley Milroy has published on a wide range of topics within the general field of linguistics, including socially significant patterns of variation and change in urban dialects, processes of language standardization, bilingualism and the conversational abilities of aphasie speakers. Since 1994 she has held a professorship in linguistics at the University of Michigan. She lived and worked in Belfast between 1968 and 1982, and after a year as a research fellow at the university, she moved to the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne where she remained till 1994. She has investigated the urban dialects of both Newcastle and Belfast and has published several books and a large number of articles on these academic interests.
Michael Montgomery is Professor of English and Linguistics at the University of South Carolina, where he specializes in the history of American English and in dialects of the American South. He is editing a dictionary of Appalachian English and is writing a book on linguistic connections between Scotland and Ireland and the American South.
Nancy Niedzielski obtained her Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is an avowed interdisciplinarian working and published across areas involving creóle languages and identity, sociophonetics, speech accommodation and language variation. Currently, she is co-authoring a volume with Dennis Preston on folk linguistics and working in the private sector.
Dennis R. Preston is Professor of Linguistics at Michigan State University in East Lansing. He is an old dialectologist who has been transformed into a sociolinguist. He is interested in the perception of language and language varieties by non-linguists and in attitudes towards varieties which are prejudiced against. Most recently he has been caught up in studying the facts of and attitudes towards massive ongoing vowel rotations in United States English. In addition, he has been intrigued by the parallels between sociolinguistic variation and the learning of second languages, suspecting that they may inform one another in ways not yet fully understood. Like any academic he teaches, publishes books and papers and hangs around with his cronies at conferences where he presents research findings from time to time.
Peter Roach graduated from Oxford University in psychology and philosophy and did postgraduate courses in TEFL (Manchester) and phonetics (UCL) before completing his Ph.D. at Reading University. He was Lecturer in Phonetics at Reading University from 1968 to 1978, then moved to the University of Leeds, where he was Senior Lecturer in Phonetics from 1978 to 1991. After moving to the Department of Psychology there in 1991, he was made Professor of Cognitive Psychology. He moved back to Reading in 1994 to become Professor of Phonetics and Director of the Speech Research Laboratory; he is currently Head of the Department of Linguistic Science there. He has held many research grants for work in speech science, has published many research papers based on this work and is also author of English Phonetics and Phonology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd edn 1991) and Introducing Phonetics (London: Penguin, 1992). He was the principal editor of the fifteenth edition of the Daniel Jones English Pronouncing Dictionary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). He is Vice-president of the International Phonetic Association.
Peter Trudgill is Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Lausanne. He was born in Norwich, England, and taught at the universities of Reading and Essex before moving to Switzerland. He is the author of three other Penguin books, Sociolinguistics: An introduction to language and society (1974), Introducing Language and Society (1992), and Bad Language (1990, with Lars Andersson). His other publications include Accent, Dialect and the School (London: Edward Arnold, 1975), The Dialects of England (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990), Dialects (London and New York: Routledge, 1994) and Dialects in Contact (Oxford and New York: Blackwell, 1986).
Walt Wolfram has pioneered research on a broad range of vernacular dialects in the United States over the past three decades, including African-American Vernacular English, Appalachian English, Puerto Rican English, Native American English, and Outer Banks English. His research on African-American English in the 1960s helped launch a national awareness of the role of vernacular dialects in education and society. In 1992, after twenty-five years as Director of Research at the Center for Applied Linguistics in Washington, DC, he became the first William C. Friday Distinguished Professor at North Carolina State, where he directs the North Carolina Language and Life Project. Recent books (with Natalie Schilling-Estes) include Hoi Toide on the Outer Banks: The story of the Ocracoke brogue (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1997) and American English: Dialects and variation (Oxford and New York: Blackwell, 1998).