Contributors' Column

Walt Wolfram Is William C. Friday Distinguished Professor at North Carolina State University and director of the North Carolina Language and Life Project. His research journey over the years has taken him from urban African American English to isolated enclave communities on the Outer Banks, with many stops in local dialect communities along the way.

William A. Kretzschmar, Jr., is professor of English and linguistics at the University of Georgia. He is editor in chief of the American Linguistic Atlas Project, for which the primary outlet is the Atlas Web site, http://us.english.uga.edu. He also works on dictionaries, including the American pronunciations for the new on-line Oxford English Dictionary.

Erik R. Thomas is associate professor of English at North Carolina State University. His research focuses on phonetic aspects of variation. Among his recent publications are An Acoustic Analysis of Vowel Variation in New World English (PADS 85, Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 2001) and The Development of African American English (with Walt Wolfram, Oxford: Blackwell, 2002).

Tracey L. Weldon is assistant professor of English and linguistics at the University of South Carolina. She is a quantitative sociolinguist, specializing in morphosyntactic variation, with a particular focus on the history and development of Gullah and African American Vernacular English.

Sylvie Dubois is professor of sociolinguistics in the Department of French Studies and the Interdepartmental Program in Linguistics at Louisiana State University. With Barbara M. Horvath, she has published several articles on discourse analysis and the varieties of English spoken in Louisiana.

Barbara M. Horvath is honorary research associate in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Sydney. She has published, with Sylvie Dubois, a number of articles on discourse and the sociolinguistics of Cajun English. Her research interests also include change and variation in Australian English and the geolinguistics of Australian and New Zealand English.

Natalie Schilling-Estes is assistant professor of linguistics at Georgetown University. She is coauthor (with Walt Wolfram) of American English: Dialects and Variation (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1998) and coeditor (with J. K. Chambers and Peter Trudgill) of The Handbook of Language Variation and Change (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2002).