Contributors' Column for Spring 2000

Walt Wolfram is William C. Friday Distinguished Professor and the director of the North Carolina Language and Life Project at North Carolina State University. His current research project focuses on insular and postinsular dialect situations that range from Hyde County, on the coast of North Carolina; to isolated white and black speech communities in Abaco in the Bahamas; to a small group of English speakers on the world's most isolated island, Tristan de Cunha, in the South Atlantic.

Dan Beckett is a graduate student at North Carolina State University whose interests range from language variation to formal syntax. His research on this project was conducted under a National Science Foundation Research Experiences for Undergraduates grant.

Alexander Kautzsch is a doctoral candidate and research assistant in English linguistics in the Department of English and American Studies at the University of Regensburg, Germany, and an editorial assistant for English World-Wide. He has taught introductory classes in English linguistics and undergraduate classes on numerous topics, including standard varieties of English, corpus linguistics, African American English, language change, and English syntax. His dissertation project combines various sources for the historical study of African American English and judges their validity and reliability by analyzing negation patterns, relative constructions, and copula usage.

Susan M. Fitzmaurice (formerly Susan Wright) is associate professor in English and Applied Linguistics at Northern Arizona University. She has taught in South Africa, where she began researching the histories of English in Africa, and in Cambridge, England, where she worked with Paul Kerswill on Cambridge English. She has published articles on the histories of spoken and written English varieties, with emphasis on extraterritorial, nonstandard varieties, such as South African English, Irish English, and Australian, and on eighteenth-century British English.