Contributing Authors

Authors

The writers on the list below, taken together, are the real "Five-Minute Linguist." Contributors to the program are linguists and language professionals in cities and universities across the U.S., as well as other parts of the world.

Robert Rodman: Program #1: "What's special about language?"
Robert Rodman is a UCLA-trained linguist who is currently a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at North Carolina State University and co-author of a popular linguistics textbook, An Introduction to Language, now going into its eighth edition.
Paul Lewis: Program #2: "How many languages are there in the world?"
Paul Lewis is a sociolinguist with SIL International. Born in the U.S., he is the child of a multi-lingual multi-cultural family with ancestors born in England, Wales, and Argentina and lived in Guatemala for nearly twenty years. He studied most recently at Georgetown University. He resides near Dallas, TX with his wife and four (Guatemala-born) children and has recently taken on the role of editor of Ethnologue: Languages of the World. The 15th edition of Ethnologue was published in Fall 2004.
Barry Hilton: Program #3: "What was the original language?"
Barry Hilton is an editor/proofreader and freelance writer who lives in Maine and describes himself as an "armchair philologist and recovering polyglot." He is also a member of the Talkin' About Talk review board.
Allan Bomhard: Program #4: "Did all languages come from the same source?"
Allan Bomhard is a linguist living in Charleston, South Carolina. His main areas of interest are distant linguistic relationship and Indo-European comparative linguistics. He has published over forty articles and five books and is currently preparing a new book on Nostratic comparative phonology, morphology, and vocabulary.
Marty Abbott/Steve Ackley: Program 5: "What is the Year of Languages?"
Martha Abbott is Director of Education for the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL). She is primarily responsible for spearheading the 2005: The Year of Languages initiative. Prior to this, Marty served in the Fairfax County Public Schools as a language teacher, foreign language coordinator, and Director of High School Instruction. She has served on national committees to develop student standards, beginning teacher standards, and performance assessments in foreign languages. She was Chair of the Northeast Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages in 1999 and President of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages in 2003. She holds her B.A. degree in Spanish with a minor in Latin from Mary Washington College and a Master's Degree in Spanish Linguistics from Georgetown University.
John Algeo: Program #6: "Where did English come from?"
John Algeo is Professor Emeritus at the University of Georgia. He is the editor of volume 6 of The Cambridge History of the English Language, on English in North America (2002), and co-author of The Origins and Development of the English Language (5th ed. 2004). He is past president of the Dictionary Society of North America, the American Dialect Society, and the American Name Society. His current project is a book on the grammatical differences between British and American English for Cambridge University Press, and he and his wife, Adele, are gathering material for a Dictionary of Briticisms.
Rick Rickerson: Program #7: "Whatever happened to Esperanto?"
Rick Rickerson is Professor Emeritus of German at the College of Charleston. He is a former Deputy Director of the federal government's Center for the Advancement of Language Learning and, most recently, Director of the College of Charleston's Division of Languages. He is the moving spirit behind Talkin' About Talk.
Orin Hargraves: Program #8: "Is British English superior to ours?"
Orin Hargraves is a tenth-generation American of almost undiluted British Isles ancestry, and has lived for considerable periods in London. He is the author of the book Mighty Fine Words and Smashing Expressions and travel guides including Culture Shock! and Morocco and London At Your Door. He has made substantial contributions to dictionaries and other reference works from publishers including Cambridge University Press, HarperCollins, Langenscheidt, Longman, Merriam-Webster, and Oxford University Press. He lives in Carroll County, Maryland. Some of his presentations can be found here.
Walt Wolfram: Program #9: "Do all Southerners have the same dialect?"
Walt Wolfram, William C. Friday Distinguished Professor of English Linguistics at North Carolina State University, describes himself as a dialect nomad who has studied dialects ranging from African American varieties in large metropolitan areas to the dialects spoken in small, isolated island and mountain communities. He has authored more than 20 books and 250 articles, in addition to producing a number of TV documentaries. More information on media productions is available at www.talkingnc.com and www.ncsu.edu/linguistics.
Catherine Ingold: Program #10: "Is there a language crisis in the US?"
Catherine Ingold is a deputy director of the National Foreign Language Center, where she deals with strategies for addressing national language needs in multiple sectors, ranging from national security to public health. Her doctorate is in French, but she also has command of Spanish, American Sign Language, and modest amounts of German and Italian. Her experience includes running a small university in Paris, teaching French and Spanish through the medium of American Sign Language, and interpreting between ASL and English, French, or Spanish.
Nina Garrett: Program #11: "What does it take to learn a Language well?"
Nina Garrett has taught French and German, at junior high-school, high-school, and college levels, and has also taught graduate-level courses on Second Language Acquisition, especially as its theory underlies language pedagogy. Her first language was Dutch, and she has also studied Russian, Latin, and Spanish. She is nationally known in Computer Assisted Language Learning for her work in developing the use of computer technology both for teaching languages and for conducting research on how language is learned. She is currently Director of the Center for Language Study at Yale University, working with teachers of fifty languages.
June Phillips: Program #12: "What's the History of Language Study in the US?"
June K. Phillips is Dean of Arts & Humanities at Weber State University. She has taught French at the junior high through college levels as well as methods of foreign language teaching. She served as President of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages in 2001. She was project director for the Foreign Language Standards and co-chaired the development of ACTFL/NCATE Program Standards for the Preparation of Foreign Language Teachers. She has consulted on the Spanish NAEP and the Annenberg/WGBH video library. She has published and edited extensively on pedagogical topics.
Jerry Lampe: Program #13: "Do all Arabs speak the same language?"
Jerry Lampe is a Deputy Director of the National Foreign Language Center (NFLC) and President of the American Association of Teachers of Arabic. He is currently working on two projects intended to increase language capacity in the US: the National Flagship Language Initiative and LangNet, an on-line language learning support system.
Leila Monaghan: Program #14: "Is sign language a universal language?"
Leila Monaghan received her PhD in linguistic anthropology at UCLA. Her dissertation work was with the New Zealand Deaf community. Her publications include work on the New Zealand Deaf community, a co-edited book "Many Ways to be Deaf," an 2002 Annual Review of Anthropology article on Deaf communities with Richard Senghas, and a forthcoming Deaf Worlds issue co-edited with Constanze Schmaling "Deafness and HIV/AIDS." She also works on literacy issues, particularly working with local Bloomington residents with a tutoring program developed by William Labov and Bettina Baker.
Walt Wolfram: Program #15: "Are dialects dying the the US?"
(see above)
John McWhorter: Program #16: "Why do languages change?"
John McWhorter is a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, earned his PhD in linguistics from Stanford University in 1993 and became Associate Professor of Linguistics at UC Berkeley after teaching at Cornell University. His academic specialty is language change and language contact. He is the author of The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language, on how the world's languages arise, change, and mix, and Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music in America and Why We Should, Like, Care. He has also written a book on dialects and Black English, The Word on the Street. The most recent of his two books on Creoles was The Missing Spanish Creoles; Defining Creole will appear in 2005. He has appeared often on radio and television programs such as Dateline NBC, Good Morning, America, The Jim Lehrer Newshour, and Fresh Air, and does regular commentaries for All Things Considered.
John Lipski: Program #17: "Is pidgin English just bad English?"
John M. Lipski is Professor of Spanish Linguistics in the Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese at the Pennsylvania State University. He received his B.A. from Rice University and Ph.D. from the University of Alberta, Canada. He has taught Spanish, Romance, and general linguistics, translation, language acquisition and methodology, Latin American literature, and a variety of language courses. His research interests include Spanish phonology, Spanish and Portuguese dialectology and language variation, the linguistic aspects of bilingualism, and the African contribution to Spanish and Portuguese. He is the author of eleven books and more than 200 articles on all aspects of linguistics and is also editor of the journal Hispanic Linguistics. He has done fieldwork in Spain (including the Canary Islands), Africa, the Caribbean, Central and South America, the Philippines, Guam, and many Spanish-speaking communities within the United States.
Nancy Nenno: Program #18: "Was German almost the language of America?"
Nancy Nenno is Associate Professor of German at the College of Charleston. She received her degrees at Brown University and University of California at Berkeley, and has studied at the University of Tubingen and the Free University of Berlin. Her research and publications focus primarily on 20th-century German literature and film.
Roberta Golinkoff/ Kathy Hirsh-Pasek: Program #19: "How do babies learn their mother tongue?"
Roberta Michnick Golinkoff holds the H. Rodney Sharp Chair in the School of Education at the University of Delaware. She directs the Infant Language Project, whose goal it is to understand how children tackle the amazing feat of learning language. Her popular press book How Babies Talk: The Magic and Mystery of Language in the First Three Years of Life (with Kathy Hirsh-Pasek) (Dutton/Penguin, 1999) invites parents and practitioners to study language development along with the scholars. Her latest book, Einstein Never Used Flash Cards: How Our Children Really Learn and Why They Need to Play More and Memorize Less (Rodale) (also with Kathy Hirsh-Pasek), was awarded the Multiple Sclerosis Society's Books for a Better Life prize in the Psychology division in 2004.

Kathryn Hirsh-Pasek is the Stanley and Debra Lefkowitz Professor in the Department of Psychology at Temple University, where she serves as Director of the Infant Language Laboratory. Her research in the areas of early language development and infant cognition have been funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health and Human Development resulting in 7 books and numerous publications. She is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and serves as Associate Editor of Child Development. Her recent book, Einstein Never used Flashcards: How children really learn and why they need to play more and memorize less, (Rodale Books) won the prestigious Books for Better Life Award as the best psychology book in 2003.
Katie Sprang: Program #20: "Can monolingualism be cured?"
Katherine Sprang holds a Ph.D. from the German Department at Georgetown University, with primary specialization in Second Language Acquisition (SLA). She is particularly interested in how excellence in teaching can bring language students to achieve superior foreign language skills. She works currently at the Foreign Service Institute, U.S. Department of State as director of the Instructional Support Division.
Barry Hilton: Program #21: "Why is Chinese so hard to learn?"
(see above)
Gladys Lipton: Program #22: "Should we teach languages in elementary school?"
Gladys Lipton serves as Director of the National FLES* (pronounced flestar) Institute (K-12). She is the author of books and many articles on Foreign Language in the Elementary School. She taught FLES Methods courses at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County; is the former Program Coordinator in Foreign Languages and ESOL for Anne Arundel country Public Schools in Maryland; and former director of foreign languages for the New York City Schools.
Peter T. Daniels: Program #23: "Where did writing come from?"
Peter T. Daniels is one of the few linguists in the world specializing in the study of writing systems. He co-edited The World's Writing Systems with William Bright for Oxford University Press (1996) and is Section Editor for Writing Systems for the Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. He has published articles in a variety of journals, edited volumes, and contributed to several encyclopedias.
Steven Weinberger: Program #24: "What Causes Foreign Accents?"
Steven H. Weinberger is Associate Professor and Director of Linguistics in the Department of English at George Mason University. He teaches courses in phonetics, phonology, and second language acquisition. His principle research deals with language sound systems, exceptional phonologies and foreign accents. He is the principle investigator and administrator of the Speech Accent Archives, a web database of over 400 English accents.
Amelia Murdoch: Program #25: "How can you keep languages in a museum?"
Amelia C. Murdoch, founder and President of the National Museum of Language, is a retired federal linguist. She began her professional career as a specialist in Medieval French; after joining the federal government, she ventured into the Semitic languages. Her appreciation of the value of language has grown through the years, as has her belief that everyone has an interest in some aspect of language, as well as a willingness and a desire to learn more about the subject.
Marianne Mithun: Program #26: "How many Native American languages are there?"
Marianne Mithun is Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her work covers such areas as morphology (word structure), relations between grammar and discourse, language typology, and language change, particularly the mechanisms by which grammatical structures evolve. She has worked with speakers of a number of North American languages, including Mohawk, Tuscarora, Seneca, Lakhota, Central Alaskan Yupik, and Navajo, as well as several Austronesian languages. Her book The Languages of Native North America was published by Cambridge University Press.
Ben Rifkin: Program #27: "Should we still be studying Russian?"
Benjamin Rifkin is Professor of Slavic Languages and Vice Dean for Undergraduate Affairs of the College of Liberal Arts at Temple University. He is a recent past-president of the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages and is a long-standing member of the board of directors of the American Council of Teachers of Russian. He is also the author of numerous articles about the learning and teaching of Russian and an intermediate-level Russian textbook published by McGraw-Hill.
Geoffrey K. Pullum: Program #28: "Does Language influence the way we think?"
Geoffrey K. Pullum is Professor of Linguistics and Distinguished Professor of Humanities at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has wide interests in linguistics, and has published on most of its subfields, but is primarily a grammarian, specializing in English. His most recent books (both co-authored with Rodney Huddleston) are The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language and a textbook based on it, A Student's Introduction to English Grammar. He is perhaps best known for his 1991 collection of often humorous and satirical essays entitled The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax. More details at people.ucsc.edu/~pullum
Erin McKean: Program #29: "How are dictionaries made?"
Eric McKean is Editor in Chief of the Oxford American Dictionaries, editor of VERBATIM: The Language Quarterly, and the author of Weird and Wonderful Words and More Weird and Wonderful Words. She has wanted to be a lexicographer since she was eight years old. She lives in Chicago, IL and spends all her free time sewing and reading magazines and blogs.
Robyn Holman: Program #30: "What's Cajun and where did it come from?"
Robyn Holman is Associate Professor of French at the College of Charleston where she also directs the graduate program for language teachers. Robyn received her Ph.D. in French linguistics from the University of Colorado. She publishes in the field of medieval French language and culture.
Dennis Preston: Program #31: "Can you set standards for language?"
Dennis R. Preston is Distinguished Professor of Linguistics at Michigan State University. He has been visiting professor at several universities and Fulbright Senior Researcher in Poland and Brazil. He has served as President of the American Dialect Society and on the Executive Boards of that Society and the International Conference on Methods in Dialectology, the editorial boards of Language, the International Journal of Applied Linguistics, and the Journal of Sociolinguistics. His work focuses on sociolinguistics, dialectology, and ethnography, minority language and variety education. He is perhaps best known for the revitalization of folk linguistics and attempts to provide variationist accounts of second language acquisition. His most recent book-length publications are, with Nancy Niedzielski, Folk Linguistics (2000), with Daniel Long, A Handbook of Perceptual Dialectology, Volume II (2002), and Needed Research in American Dialects (2003). He is a fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and was awarded the Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Polish Republic in 2004.
Maria Carreira: Program #32: "What is the future of Spanish in the US?"
Maria Carreira is professor of Spanish linguistics at California State University, Long Beach. Her publications focus on Spanish in the United States and Spanish as a world language. She is the co-author of a beginning Spanish textbook (Nexos, Houghton Mifflin, 2005) and a forthcoming textbook for teaching Spanish to bilingual Latinos (Sí se puede, Houghton Mifflin). Dr. Carreira received her Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign.
G. Tucker Childs: Program #33: "Is it a dialect or a language?"
G. Tucker Childs is a professor in the Applied Linguistics Department at Portland State University, where he teaches courses in phonetics, phonology, language variation, and sociolinguistics. He and several of his students have begun researching the dialects of Portland in the "Portland Dialect Study". Childs also has interests in African languages; his most recent book in that area is An Introduction to African Languages, and in 2004 he began a project documenting the moribund Mani language of Guinea and Sierra Leone.
Blaine Erickson: Program #34: "Is Japanese related to Chinese?"
Blaine Erickson is a Ph.D and Assistant Professor of Japanese at the Defense Language Institute at the Presidio of Monterey. He was educated at the University of Oregon, Waseda University, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the University of Tokyo, and the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He specializes in both modern and historical Japanese phonology and morphology, with interests in historical Chinese, modern Cantonese, and modern and historical English.
Pardee Lowe Jr.: Prgram #35: "Why are linguists interested in Icelandic?"
Pardee Lowe Jr. has a Ph.D in Linguistics from the University of California at Berkeley. He is a specialist in foreign language proficiency testing and an independent scholar and writer. He has taught Ancient Icelandic (aka Old Norse) and long enjoyed the delights of Old Icelandic language and literature.
Michael Erard: Program #36: "Why is language a National Security issue?"
Michael Erard writes about language (and other topics) for The New York Times, Technology Review, Wired, New Scientist, and other publications. His first book, about slips of the tongue, "uh" and "um," and other verbal blunders (and about why we don't speak as well as we'd like to) is scheduled to be published by Pantheon in the spring of 2006. He holds a PhD in English and an MA in linguistics from The University of Texas at Austin.
Donald Osborne: Program #37: "Is Swahili the language of Africa?"
Donald Osborn is an independent scholar, currently teaching at Chengdu University of Technology in China. He is a specialist in environment, agriculture and development who has studied and speaks two African languages and published a lexicon of one of them: Fulfulde. He has lived and worked eleven years in West Africa. He also runs Bisharat, a small initiative to facilitate use of African languages on computers and the internet.
Robert Rodman: Program #38: "Is each person's language unique?"
(see above)
David Savignac: Program #39: "How good is machine translation?"
David Savignac is Director of the Center for Applied Machine Translation at the National Security Agency at Fort George G. Meade, Maryland. A multi-linguist by training and a bit of a medievalist in his spare time, he holds a Ph.D. in Slavic linguistics from the Slavic Department at Stanford University and has worked for the Department of Defense for over three decades.
Kevin Hendzel: Program #40: "Why do we need translators if we have dictionaries?"
Kevin Hendzel is a graduate of Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service, and former head linguist on the technical translation staff of the Presidential Hotline between the White House and the Kremlin. He is currently the national media spokesman for the American Translators Association. As such he is a well-known spokesman on translation and interpreting issues on national and international media, including National Public Radio. His translations from Russian into English include 34 books and 2,200 articles published in the areas of physics, technology and law.
David Goldberg: Program #41: "Who speaks what languages in the U.S.?"
David Goldberg is Associate Director of the office of foreign language programs and the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages at the Modern Language Association. He is the associate editor of the ADFL Bulletin, and is responsible for the continuing development of the MLA Language Map. Goldberg holds a PhD in Yiddish literature, and has taught Yiddish language and literature in heritage language schools and at Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of an intermediate level Yiddish text book published by Yale University Press.
Sheri Spaine Long: Program #42: "Why study abroad?"
Sheri Spaine Long (Ph.D., UCLA) currently serves as chairperson of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). She teaches Spanish language, culture, and literature. Long writes about Madrid in the contemporary Spanish novel. She is the co-author of Nexos: Introductory Spanish (Houghton Mifflin, 2005) and Pueblos: Intermediate Spanish in Cultural Contexts (forthcoming). She has published articles in Associated Departments of Foreign Languages Bulletin, Dimension, Foreign Language Annals, Hispania, Modern Language Journal and Romance Languages Annual. She serves on the board of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages and the Southern Conference on the Teaching of Languages, and she is an Associate of the National Museum of Language.
Ana Maria Carvalho: Program #43: "How close is Portuguese related to Spanish?"
Ana Maria Carvalho (Ph.D., University of California at Berkeley) is an Assistant Professor of Portuguese and Spanish linguistics at the University of Arizona, where she also directs the Portuguese Language Program. She studies the sociolinguistics of languages in contact, especially the contact between Spanish and Portuguese in the bilingual communities of Northern Uruguay. In addition to her work on sociolinguistics, she has published on the acquisition of Portuguese by Spanish speakers.
TBA: Program #44: "To Be Announced"
Henk Haarmann: Program #45: "Is a slip of the tongue really a slip of the brain?"
Henk Haarmann is an associate research scientist at the Center for Advanced Study of Language (CASL) of the University of Maryland. He is a Cognitive Psychologist, who has studied language memory through computer modeling and measurement of brain activity. He was born in the Netherlands. He received doctoral training at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands and post-doctoral training at Carnegie Mellon University.
Dora Johnson: Program #46: "What's bilingualism?"
Dora Johnson is an associate at the Center for Applied Linguistics. Her work at CAL has centered around the teaching and learning of less commonly taught languages. At present, she is working on a project to develop a network of Arabic K-12 language teachers in the U.S.
Christopher Moseley: Program #47: "Why do languages die?"
Christopher Moseley is a linguist at BBC Monitoring, part of the BBC World Service, which translates news items from the world's media, based near Reading, England. He is also a writer and freelance translator, and editor of the Atlas of the World's Languages, and the Encyclopedia of the World's Endangered Languages. He has a special interest in artificial languages (and has created one himself).
Akira Yamamoto: Program #48: "Why revitalize a threatened language?"
Akira Y. Yamamoto is a professor of anthropology and linguistics at the University of Kansas. He has been active in bringing together language communities and professional communities for language and culture revitalization programs. He chaired the Linguistic Society of America's Committee on Endangered languages and Their Preservation, and co-chaired UNESCO's Ad Hoc Expert Group on Endangered Languages.
Chris Moseley: Program #49: "Does anyone here speak Klingon?"
See above
Paul B. Garrett: Program #50: "What causes language conflicts?"
Paul B. Garrett, Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Temple University, is a linguistic anthropologist whose research focuses on the creole languages and cultures of the Caribbean region-particularly the island of St. Lucia, where he has conducted long-term ethnographic fieldwork on language socialization and language shift. Other research interests and specializations include language contact, ideologies of language, and the political economy of language.
Frederick H. Jackson: Program #51: "Can you make a living loving language?"
Frederick H. Jackson is Coordinator of the federal Interagency Language Roundtable. He is a language training supervisor at the State Department's Foreign Service Institute (FSI). He has an M.A. in English as a Second Language and a Ph.D. in Linguistics, both from the University of Hawaii. He has done research in the languages of Micronesia and Mainland Southeast Asia, and has taught at the University of Hawaii, Chiangmai University in Thailand and the Pennsylvania State University.
Eric Bakovic: Program #52: "What is the future of linguistics research?"
Eric Bakovic is Assistant Professor in the Linguistics Department at the University of California, San Diego. His research specialization is in phonological theory. Eric is the administrator of the Rutgers Optimality Archive, an online repository of work in, on, and about Optimality Theory, and is also the creator of phonoloblog, a weblog devoted to discussions by and for phonologists. He also occasionally contributes to Language Log, a language-related weblog of broader public interest. Note: Eric's contribution to this series was made with the invaluable assistance of Andrew Kehler (Linguistics, UCSD) and Robert Malouf and Mark Gawron (Linguistics and Oriental Languages, SDSU).

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