Media Contacts—This list of language professionals 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 via a Google search. Please see the links at right for great resources to answer your everyday or "just wondering" language-related questions.
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:
The English-Only Question: An Official Language for Americans? (Yale Univ. Press, 1990) Guide to Home Language Repair (NCTE, 1994)
Declining Grammar (NCTE 1989)
Grammar and Gender (Yale Univ Press, 1986)
Grammar and Good Taste: Reforming the American Language (Yale Univ. Press, 1982)
"Don't make English Official; Ban It Instead"
"Ebonics and the Politics of Language"
Contact Dennis Baron:
Mobile telephone: (217) 840-0776
Grant Barrett
Project Editor, Historical Dictionary of American Slang
Assistant Editor, U.S. Dictionaries, Oxford University Press
Editor, Double-Tongued Word Wrester, an online dictionary of fringe English.
Webmaster, American Dialect Society
Areas of Expertise:
New words (neologisms), word histories, American slang, political slang.
Grant received a BA in French from Columbia University and has a professional background in broadcast and print journalism, and in technology consulting.
Publications:
Editor, Hatchet Jobs & Hardball: The Oxford Dictionary of American Political Slang (July 2004)
Contact Grant Barrett:
Office: (212) 726-6142
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:
The Death of Black English: Divergence and Convergence in White and Black Vernaculars. Bamberger Beiträge zur Englischen Sprachwissenschaft, 25. Frankfurt am Main / Bern / New York: Peter Lang, 1989.
"Linguistic Change in Words One Owns: How Trademarks Become 'Generic'," Studies in the History of the English Language II. Ed. By Anne Curzan and Kim Emmons. Topics in English Linguistics. (Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter, forthcoming in 2004) [Jennifer Westerhaus, second author] [Revision of a paper read at the Second Conference on the History of the English Language, University of Washington, Seattle, 23 March 2002.]
"Literary Qualities in Sociolinguistic Narratives of Personal Experience," American Speech 76 (Fall 2001), 227Ð35. [American Dialect Society Presidential Address, January 2001.
"'We didn't realize that lite beer was supposed to suck!':The Putative Vulgarity of X sucks in American English," Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America 22 (2001). [Revision of a paper read at the meeting of the American Dialect Society, January 6, 2000.]
Contact Ron Butters:
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:
The Barnhart Dictionary Companion [quarterly]
The Barnhart New-Words Concordance
"Prizes and Pitfalls of Computerized Searching For New Words For Dictionaries," in Dictionaries [publication of the Dictionary Society of North America], No. 7, 1985
"Reflections In Lexicography" in American Speech, Vol. 75.4, Winter 2000
"Words of the Century" in the Poughkeepsie Journal, May 9, 1999
P.O. Box 2018
Hyde Park, N.Y. 12538
(914) 850-8484
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."
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:
Studies in Slang (7 volumes; last one co-authored) Origin of New York City's Nickname "The Big Apple" Dictionary of 1913 Baseball and Other Slang (3 vols.)
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:
Slang and Sociability, 1996, UNC Press
"The Englishes of Southern Louisiana" In Stephen J. Nagle and Sara L.
Sanders, Englishes in the Southern United States, 2003, Cambridge U Press.
Contact Connie Eble:
Office: (919) 962-0469, Mon., Wed., Fri., 11 a.m.-noon EST
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:
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.
Barry Popik
consultant, Oxford English Dictionary
consulting editor, Oxford Encyclopedia of American Food and Drink, (forthcoming, 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 is an administrative law judge in the New York City bureau of parking violations. His website, www.barrypopik.com, includes much of his research and many of his discoveries.
Publications:
Contributor, Comments on Etymology (Gerald Cohen, editor)
Co-author with Gerald Cohen of Studies in Slang, part VI
Contact Barry Popik:
Dennis R. Preston
Michigan State University, University Distinguished Professor of Linguistics
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:
With Nancy Niedzielski, 2003, rev. pb. ed, Folk Linguistics, Mouton de Gruyter.
With Daniel Long (eds), 2000, Handbook of Perceptual Dialectology II,
Benjamins.
Ed. 2003, Needed Research in American Dialects, 2003 (PADS 88).
Contact Dennis Preston:
Fred R. Shapiro
Associate Librarian for Collections and Access and Lecturer in
Legal Research, Yale Law School; Editor, Yale Dictionary of Quotations
Areas of Expertise:
Origins of quotations, origins of words.
Publications: Yale Dictionary of Quotations (Yale University Press,
forthcoming, intended to be the most authoritative quotation dictionary) Stumpers!: Answers to Hundreds of Questions That Stumped the Experts (Random House, 1998) Oxford Dictionary of American Legal Quotations (Oxford University Press,
1993)
Contact Fred Shapiro:
Office: (203) 432-4840
Jesse Sheidlower
Editor At Large, Oxford English Dictionary
Areas of Expertise: Dictionaries, Americanisms, slang, word origins.
Areas of Expertise:
Word, phrase, and slang origins.
Dave is a graduate of Lafayette College, where he received a BA, and of George Washington University, where he received an MA. He is currently working
as a software product manager in Silicon Valley, and in a past life worked in defense contracting and arms control negotiations.
Author: Word Myths: Debunking Urban Legends About Language, Oxford Univ.
Press, 2004
Contact Dave Wilton:
Arnold M. Zwicky
Visiting Professor of Linguistics, Stanford University
Areas of Expertise:
Syntactic variation, speech errors, gay language, style and stylistics.
Publications:
1995. Exceptional degree markers: A puzzle in external and internal syntax. OSU WPL 47.111-23.
1997. Two lavender issues for linguists. Kira Hall & Anna Livia (eds.), Queerly phrased. Oxford Univ. Press (1997) 21-34.
2002. I wonder what kind of construction that this example illustrates. David Beaver et al. (eds.), The construction of meaning. Stanford CA: CSLI (2002) 219-48.