Trudgill Peter - Alternative Histories of English Language

David Crystal is honorary professor of linguistics at the University of Wales, Bangor. His authored works are mainly in the field of language, and include The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language and The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. The founding editor of Linguistics Abstracts, Journal of Child Language and Child Language Teaching and Therapy, he is currently editor-in-chief of a series of general reference encyclopaedias.

Elizabeth Gordon is a fourth-generation New Zealander, born and educated in Christchurch, New Zealand. She studied at the University of Canterbury (Christchurch) and University College London. Since 1967 she has been teaching at the University of Canterbury, where she is an associate professor in the Department of Linguistics. For the past 20 years she has specialised in sociolinguistics, and her research is mainly into aspects of New Zealand English. She is co-leader of the Origins of New Zealand English project (ONZE) at the University of Canterbury.

Dawn Harvie is working on her doctorate in linguistics at the University of Ottawa. She is the editorial assistant for Language Variation and Change and has both written and edited works on African-American English.

Andreas H. Jucker is Professor of English Linguistics at the Justus Liebig University Giessen. His current research interests focus on the history of English, historical pragmatics and cognitive pragmatics. Publications include Social Stylistics, Historical Pragmatics (edited), Discourse Markers (co-edited), Current Issues in Relevance Theory (co-edited), Historical Dialogue Analysis (co-edited) and History of English and English Historical Linguistics. He is the series editor of Pragmatics & Beyond New Series (Amsterdam: Benjamins) and the co-editor of the Journal of Historical Pragmatics.

Rajend Mesthrie is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Cape Town and currently President of the Linguistics Society of Southern Africa. His research interests are in sociolinguistics generally, with an emphasis on lanuage contact and variation in the South African context. He is the editor of the forthcoming Concise Encyclopedia of Sociolinguistics (Elsevier, 2001).

Sharon Millar is associate professor at the Institute of Language and Communication, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, where she teaches English language and linguistics. Her research interests include language prescription and norms, rhetoric, language acquisition and comprehension. She is particularly interested in the interface between sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics, that is the interrelationship between social/cultural factors and cognition. Ongoing projects range from the nature of metalinguistic awareness among Danish children to the rhetorical analysis of letters-to-the-editor in the Danish press.

Jim Milroy is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics, University of Sheffield. He formerly lectured in English language at the Queens University of Belfast and is now working in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Michigan. He is author of The Language of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Andre Deutsch, 1977), Linguistic Variation and Change (Blackwell, 1992) and (with Lesley Milroy) Authority in Language, 3rd edn (Routledge, 1999).

Terttu Nevalainen is Professor of English Philology and the Director of the Research Unit for Variation and Change in English at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Her research project Sociolinguistics and Language History has produced the Corpus of Early English Correspondence and a number of studies on English historical sociolinguistics. Her other research interests include phonetics and historical lexicology.

Shana Poplack is Professor and Canada Research Chair in Linguistics and Director of the Sociolinguistics Laboratory at the University of Ottawa. An expert in linguistic variation theory and its application to diverse areas of language contact, she has published widely on code-switching, Hispanic linguistics, Canadian French and numerous aspects of African-American English.

Dennis R. Preston would have been a professional basketball player if it hadnt been for his height (510") and some small lack of speed. Instead, he is a sociolinguist and dialectologist, at present the President of the American Dialect Society and Director of the 2003 LSA Summer Institute. His main interests are dialect acquisition, language attitudes, folk linguistics (including perceptual dialectology) and general questions of variation and change, including variationist approaches to second language acquisition, He lives quietly with his wife Carol and mother Roena at the end of a cul-de-sac in Okemos, Michigan, USA, where he is in charge of the cooking.