Our featured author this month is Janet M. Fuller, Director of Women’s Studies at Southern Illinois University – Carbondale and editor of Sociolinguistics section of the Language & Linguistics Compass. Her work on bilingualism and discourse analysis has appeared in The International Journal of Bilingualism, American Speech, Language in Society, The Journal of Linguistic Anthropology and The Journal of Sociolinguistics. Her current research focuses on Spanish–English and German–English bilingual children in the USA and Germany. She can be reached at
January’s invited essayist Lauren Hall-Lew is Lecturer in Sociolinguistics at University of Edinburgh. Her work on vowel variation in U.S. English has appeared in American Speech, Language & Linguistic Compass, and English Today. Her current research focuses on the changing the pronunciation of English in San Francisco, California, and its connection to the area’s changing social landscape. She can be reached at
The latest story from the field is brought to us by Patience Epps, Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on indigenous Amazonian languages, typology, and language contact and change. Her publications include A Grammar of Hup, as well as papers in Diachronica, International Journal of American Linguistics, Linguistic Typology, and Studies in Language. Her story, “The Path to Pij Dëh”, is an account of her experiences in the field in 2001, while studying the language of the Hup people of the northwest Amazon. She can be reached at
This month’s explanation of linguistic theory comes from Corrine McCarthy, Associate Professor of Linguistics at George Mason University. Her work on the acquisition of morphology has appeared in Second Language Research. She also does research on sociolinguistics and dialects of American English. She can be reached at
And finally, January’s “Last Words” column is written by none other than Popular Linguistics Magazine‘s own intrepid Editor-in-Chief, DS Bigham. Yours truly works on phonetics and sociolinguistics, investigating the effects of inter-ethnic dialect contact and accommodation among emerging adults. He can be reached at
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