This list of linguistics and language experts is intended for media or professional contacts only. It is not a source of first resort for everyday language questions, such as those which are easily answered by a good dictionary, a trip to the library, or a Google search.
Language and Linguistics Experts Contact List
The people listed below are happy to help journalists find or verify necessary facts, but please do NOT contact every person on this list with the same questions. Choose one or two who have the appropriate expertise and ALWAYS tell them whom else you are contacting, either from this list or from elsewhere. This will save much duplicate effort and allow your contacts to defer to someone with more expertise.
If you do not see an expert appropriate to your topic, please email the web site administrator, who can often recommend the best person to talk to from this list or elsewhere, at administrator@americandialect.org.
While this is not a speaker’s bureau, many of the people listed below are also available for public speaking engagements and would be happy to discuss giving a presentation or leading a session at your upcoming conference or event.
Name Index— David K. Barnhart, Dennis Baron, Grant Barrett, Ronald R. Butters, Gerald Cohen, Bethany Dumas, Connie Eble, Wayne Glowka, Jill Hallett, Kirk Hazen, William A. Kretzschmar, Jr., Lynne Murphy, James A. Landau, Allan Metcalf, Salikoko S. Mufwene, Barry Popik, Dennis Preston, Luanne von Schneidemesser, Fred Shapiro, Jesse Sheidlower, Arthur K. Spears, Robert Wachal, Dave Wilton, Ben Zimmer, Arnold Zwicky.
David K. Barnhart
Lexik House Publishers
Areas of Expertise:
New words (neologisms), trademarks, dictionaries, lexicography.
David has been tracking new words in American English for decades, and appears regularly in the media to speak on the subjects of words, language, and dictionaries.
Publications:
Contact David K. Barnhart:
http://lexikhouse.com
info@lexikhouse.com
P.O. Box 2018
Hyde Park, N.Y. 12538
(914) 850-8484
Dennis Baron
Professor of English and Linguistics, Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Areas of expertise: Literacy, writing, bilingualism, the state of the English language, language reform, language and the law, technology and communication.
Dennis has made frequent radio appearances to discuss language issues, and has written op-ed essays on language and literacy issues in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. He received a doctorate in English from the University of Michigan in 1971, a Masters from Columbia University in 1969 and a BA from Brandeis University in 1965.
Publications:
Contact Dennis Baron:
http://www.uiuc.edu/goto/weboflanguage
debaron@uiuc.edu
Mobile telephone: (217) 840-0776
Grant Barrett
Areas of Expertise:
Slang, jargon, new words (neologisms), words of the year, teaching language, new language, language change, copyediting, buzzwords, lexicography, dictionaries, thesauruses, word histories, American slang, political slang, online slang, teen slang, youth language.
Vice President of Communications and Technology of the American Dialect Society; co-host and co-producer of the nationwide public radio show about language, A Way With Words; editor of the Double-Tongued Dictionary, a web site that collects new words, slang, and jargon; founder and former editorial director of Wordnik; editor emeritus of the “Among the New Words” column of the journal American Speech; chair emeritus of the “New Words Committee” of the American Dialect Society; editor of The Official Dictionary of Unofficial English (McGraw-Hill, May 2006) and The Oxford Dictionary of American Political Slang (July 2004). His full bio and credentials are here.
Grant received a BA in French from Columbia University and has a professional background in broadcast and print journalism.
Contact Grant Barrett:
Main phone (646) 286-2260 (mobile/home/office);
San Diego, California (619) 800-3348 (forwards to main phone);
U.K. 020 8133 1997 (forwards to main phone)
grantbarrett@gmail.com
Web sites: Grant Barrett’s blog and radio show, A Way with Words
Ronald R. Butters
Professor of English and Cultural Anthropology, Duke University
Areas of Expertise:
Language and law; meaning and change of meaning in American English words, particularly terms of abuse and taboo words; American social and regional dialects; American English in general.
Ron received a BA and PhD from the University of Iowa in English, the PhD with a concentration in linguistics. He has taught at Duke University in North Carolina since 1967.
Publications:
Contact Ron Butters:
ronbutters@aol.com
Web site: Trademark Linguistics
Gerald Cohen
Professor of German and Russian, University of Missouri-Rolla.
Areas of Expertise:
Etymology, especially of British and American slang, and the origin of terms such as “hot dog,” “shyster,” “eureka,” and “The Big Apple,” “gung ho,” “shyster,” “jazz,” “namby pamby.”
Gerald is the editor of Comments on Etymology, a series of working papers which began in 1971. He has a Ph.D. in Slavic Linguistics from Columbia University, and primarily researches etymologies.
Publications:
Contact Gerald Cohen:
gcohen@umr.edu
Office: (573) 341-4869
Bethany K. Dumas
Professor of English and Chair, IDP Linguistics Program, The University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Areas of Expertise:: Language and law (jury instructions, adequacy of warnings, ambiguity in legal documents, authorship attribution, etc.), American slang, language and social media, American dialects (Southern, Southern Mountain — Ozark and Appalachian).
Bethany began her linguistic studies at The University of Arkansas and completed a dissertation based on interviews with natives in the heart of the Arkansas Ozarks. She continued her study of Southern Mountain English in Southern Appalachia after she began teaching in Knoxville, Tennessee, where she has taught since 1974. In the late 1970s she became interested in helping to improve the comprehensibility of jury instructions and began study at the University of Tennessee College of Law, where she earned her J.D. degree in 1985. She has testified in many court cases and currently serves on the Tennessee Bar Association Tennessee Pattern Instructions — Civil — Committee.
Publications:
Contact Bethany K. Dumas:
office 865.974.6965
dumasb@utk.edu
Connie Eble
Professor of English, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Editor of the journal American Speech
Areas of Expertise:
American college slang; language in Louisiana.
Connie is an expert in university and college slang. She received her doctorate in linguistics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she has been a faculty member in the Department of English since 1971.
Publications:
Contact Connie Eble:
cceble@email.unc.edu
Office: (919) 962-0469, Mon., Wed., Fri., 11 a.m.-noon EST
Wayne Glowka
Dean of Arts and Humanities, Reinhardt College, Waleska, Georgia; former editor of “Among the New Words” for the journal American Speech, former chair of the American Dialect Society Committee on New Words
B. A. in English, May 1973, University of Texas at Austin
M. A. in English, May 1975, University of Texas at Austin
Ph. D. in English, May 1980, University of Delaware
Areas of Expertise:
New words (neologisms), history of the English language
Publications:
Articles in Teaching Writing, Gypsy Scholar, Explicator, Victorian Poetry, Allegorica, USF Language Quarterly, Interpretations: A Journal of Idea, Analysis, and Criticism, Poetica: An International Journal of Linguistic-Literary Studies, American Speech, Arthurian Interpretations, Studies in American Humor, Text and Tradition in Layamon’s Brut, International Journal for the Semiotics of Law, Literacy and Orality in Early Middle English Literature, Dictionaries, La3amon: Contexts, Language, and Interpretation.
Contact Wayne Glowka:
awg@reinhardt.edu
Office (770) 720-5628
Jill Hallett
Areas of Expertise:
African-American English, Indian English, classroom-based discourse, American/ world Englishes, linguistics and literature, secondary education.
Affiliation:
PhD Candidate, Linguistics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Assistant Editor of World Englishes
Major Publications:
Contact Jill Hallett:
phone: (until June 2010): +91-96-5427-5127
jillh@illinois.edu
http://illinois.academia.edu/JillHallett
Kirk Hazen
Areas of Expertise:
Language and society; ethnic dialects; Appalachian English; Southern English; language and education; language change,
Affiliation:
West Virginia Dialect Project, Department of English, West Virginia University
Major Publications:
Contact Kirk Hazen:
Kirk.Hazen@mail.wvu.edu
phone: (304) 293-9721
http://www.as.wvu.edu/~khazen/
William A. Kretzschmar, Jr.
Areas of Expertise:
English language studies, especially survey research on language variation and corpus linguistics. American English and dialects. Sociolinguistics. Humanities computing. English lexicography. Complexity science.
William A. Kretzschmar, Jr., is Harry and Jane Willson Professor in Humanities at the University of Georgia, where he teaches English and linguistics. He serves as board member for various professional journals, atlases, and dictionaries, including preparation of American pronunciations for the new online Oxford English Dictionary. He is the Editor of the American Linguistic Atlas Project, the oldest and largest national research project to study how people speak differently in different parts of the country, and maintains an active community-language field site in Roswell, Georgia. He has performed consulting work over the years for forensic, industrial, and academic clients (see www.text-tech.com), with a particular specialty in large-scale automated document evaluation. His Linguistics of Speech demonstrates that language in use, speech, is a complex system as described for the physical and natural sciences, and thus suggests how complexity science can help to solve practical and commercial language problems.
Major Publications:
Contact Bill Kretzschmar:
American Linguistic Atlas Project
Text Tech
phone: 706-542-2246
email: kretzsch@uga.edu, wkretzschmar@text-tech.com
James A. Landau
Areas of Expertise:
Mainly mathematical terms, but also physical science, including physics, chemistry, and astronomy.
James has a BS in mathematics, an MS in computer engineering, and 35 years’ experience in the computer field. He is a contributor of mathematical antedatings to the web site Earliest Known Uses of Some of the Words of Mathematics.
Contact James A. Landau:
JJJRLandau@netscape.com
(609) 927-7769
Lynne Murphy
Areas of Expertise:
Word meaning; American versus British English; socionyms — that is, names for categories of people (race, sexual orientation, nationality, etc.); relations among words, especially oppositeness (antonyms); Scrabble crossword game.
Affiliation
Senior Lecturer in Linguistics, University of Sussex, Brighton UK
Some Publications:
Contact Lynne Murphy:
m.l.murphy@sussex.ac.uk
phone (UK): +44-1273-678844
http://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com
Allan Metcalf
Professor of English, MacMurray College
Executive Secretary, American Dialect Society
Areas of Expertise:
Word meanings and histories, new words, words of the year, American dialects, California dialects, journalism, language and law (copyright, author identification, document interpretation, etc.).
Allan is the author of half a dozen books on American English aimed at general readers. He also posts weekly on the Lingua Franca blog of the Chronicle of Higher Education.
His most recent book is OK: The Improbable Story of America’s Greatest Word (Oxford University Press, 2010). Revised paperback edition, 2012. “It is a sterling example of what linguistic scholarship can, and should, be for the general reader,” John Algeo wrote in Dictionaries, the journal of the Dictionary Society of North America.
In 2011 Allan inaugurated the annual celebration of the birthday of OK on March 23 with the Facebook page OKDayMarch23.
Previous books, all with Houghton Mifflin:
- Presidential Voices: Speaking Styles from George Washington to George W. Bush (2004)
- Predicting New Words: The Secrets of Their Success (2002)
- How We Talk: American Regional English Today (2000)
- The World in So Many Words. [The story of one word from each of the hundreds of languages that have given words to English.] (1999)
- America in So Many Words: Words That Have Shaped America. With David K. Barnhart. [The story of a word or phrase for each year in American history.] (1997)
Allan has a bachelor’s degree in English from Cornell University, where he was editor in chief of the Cornell Daily Sun, and M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.
As executive secretary of the American Dialect Society, in 1990 he initiated the society’s annual vote on Words of the Year.
Contact Allan Metcalf::
217.370.5745
allan.metcalf@gmail.com
www.allanmetcalf.com
Salikoko S. Mufwene
The Frank J. McLoraine Distinguished Service Professor of Linguistics and the College, University of Chicago
Areas of Expertise:
Ecology of language evolution, especially regarding language diversification, language birth, and language death.
Sali is currenctly conducting research on colonization, globalization, and language, including (English) creoles, indigenized Englishes, and contact languages of central Africa (especially Lingala and Kikongo-Kituba), from which he extrapolates to other languages.
He has published on Gullah (USA), African American English (a.k.a. Ebonics), indigenized Englishes, French varieties of Africa, and Jamaican Creole, among other languages.
Contact Sali Mufwene:
s-mufwene@uchicago.edu
Office: (773) 702-8531
Visit his web site
Barry Popik
consultant, Oxford English Dictionary
consulting editor, Oxford Encyclopedia of American Food and Drink (2004)
contributor, Historical Dictionary of American Slang; Dictionary of American Regional English; Paul Dickson’s New Baseball Dictionary
Areas of Expertise:
Americanisms, slang, new words, phrases, food terms, sports terms, political terms, specifically the true histories and origins of “Big Apple,” “Windy City,” “hot dog,” “I’m from Missouri” and other terms.
Barry was formerly an administrative law judge in the New York City bureau of parking violations. He now lives in Texas. His website, www.barrypopik.com, includes much of his research and many of his discoveries.
Publications:
Contact Barry Popik:
bapopik@aol.com
Dennis R. Preston
Oklahoma State University, Regents Professor
Michigan State Univerity, University Distinguished Professor Emeritus
Areas of Expertise:
American dialects, language variation and change, language attitudes, folk linguistics.
Dennis received a BA in Humanities from the University of Louisville in 1961, and his PhD in English Linguistics from the University of Wisconsin in 1969.
Publications:
Benjamins.
Contact Dennis Preston:
preston@msu.edu or dennis.preston@okstate.edu
Luanne von Schneidemesser
Senior Editor, Dictionary of American Regional English
Areas of Expertise:
Dictionary of American Regional English, dictionaries, German influence on America English
Luanne has been with DARE since 1978. She received her PhD in German linguistics/philology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Publications:
Contact Luanne von Schneidemesser:
Lvonschn@wisc.edu
Office: (608) 265-0532
Fred R. Shapiro
Associate Librarian for Collections and Access and Lecturer in Legal Research, Yale Law School; Editor, Yale Book of Quotations
Areas of Expertise:
Origins of quotations, origins of words, trademarks.
Publications:
1993)
Contact Fred Shapiro:
fred.shapiro@yale.edu
Office: (203) 432-4840
Jesse Sheidlower
Editor At Large, Oxford English Dictionary
Areas of Expertise: Dictionaries, Americanisms, slang, word origins.
Contact Jesse Sheidlower:
jester@panix.com
Office: (212) 726-6215
Arthur K. Spears
Areas of Expertise:
African-American English, controversial expressions
(obscenity), Haitian French Creole, pidgin and creole languages.
Affiliation:
City University of New York
Major Publications:
Contact Arthur Spears:
phone: (212) 650-7350
arspears@earthlink.net
http://www.arthurkspears.com/
Robert Wachal
Professor Emeritus, Linguistics Department, University of Iowa
Ph.D. (University of Wisconsin), 1964, 37 years of teaching and research
Areas of Expertise:
ESL, English grammar, English usage, abbreviations, lexicography
Publications:
Houghton-Mifflin Abbreviations Dictionary (1st ed.)
Articles in American Speech on grammar and usage
Contact Robert Wachal:
robert-wachal@uiowa.edu
319-331-4012
Dave Wilton
Editor, WordOrigins.org
Areas of Expertise:
Word, phrase, and slang origins.
Dave is currently a Ph.D. student in medieval English literature at the University of Toronto. He is a graduate of Lafayette College, where he received his BA in government and law, and of George Washington University, where he received his MA in national security policy. In past lives he has worked as a product manager in Silicon Valley and done arms control work for the US Defense Department.
Author:
Press, 2004
Contact Dave Wilton:
dave.wilton@utoronto.ca
Ben Zimmer
Chair of the New Words Committee of the American Dialect Society
Executive Producer, the Visual Thesaurus and Vocabulary.com
Former “On Language” columnist, The New York Times Magazine
Consultant, the Oxford English Dictionary
Areas of Expertise:
word origins, neologisms, American speech, dictionaries and thesauruses
Ben Zimmer is a linguist, lexicographer, language columnist, and all-around word nut. He is the Chair of the New Words Committee of the American Dialect Society, overseeing the selection of the society’s Word of the Year and the publication of the quarterly feature “Among the New Words” in the journal American Speech. He is the executive producer of the Visual Thesaurus and Vocabulary.com, and he previously wrote the “On Language” column for The New York Times Magazine. He has worked as editor for American dictionaries at Oxford University Press and as a consultant to the Oxford English Dictionary. In addition to the “On Language” column and his Visual Thesaurus column “Word Routes,” his writing about language has appeared in the Boston Globe, Forbes.com, and Slate. He is also a regular contributor to Language Log, and his writing about language has appeared in two blog anthologies: Ultimate Blogs and Far from the Madding Gerund.
Ben studied linguistics as an undergraduate at Yale University and linguistic anthropology as a Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago. He has also been a research associate at the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He currently serves on the Executive Council of the American Dialect Society.
Contact Ben Zimmer:
Office: (212) 381-0550
bzimmer@thinkmap.com
http://benzimmer.com/contact/
Arnold M. Zwicky
Visiting Professor of Linguistics, Stanford University
Areas of Expertise:
Syntactic variation, speech errors, gay language, style and stylistics, formulaic language, literature giving advice on grammar, style, and usage.
Publications:
Contact Arnold Zwicky:
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~zwicky
zwicky@csli.stanford.edu
Stanford office: (650) 725-0023
Home: (650) 323-0753
Private office: (650) 843-0550