About the authors

Tyler Kendall

Tyler Kendall is Associate Professor of Linguistics at University of Oregon. His research examines a range of topics in language variation and change, sociophonetics, and corpus-based and computational linguistics, with data primarily drawn from communities in the United States. He also has written extensively about the nature of data and methodology in the analysis of speech. With co-author Valerie Fridland, he has led the Vowels in America project, a large-scale study of the production and perception of vowels across U.S. dialect regions. In collaboration with a team of researchers at the University of Oregon and sociolinguists elsewhere, Tyler has also led the development of the Corpus of Regional African American Language (CORAAL), the first public corpus of African American Language. Much of his wider work focuses on corpora in and computational approaches to sociolinguistics. Along these lines, he is the developer of several sociolinguistic software projects, including the Sociolinguistic Archive and Analysis Project (SLAAP) and the Vowels.R package for the R programming language and its NORM website.

Tyler is author of numerous articles and book chapters across the topics of his research and other academic work. He is author of the book Speech Rate, Pause, and Sociolinguistic Variation: Studies in Corpus Sociophonetics (2013, Palgrave Macmillan) and has recently co-edited the three-volume series on Speech in the Western States (2016, 2017, 2020, Duke University Press), along with Valerie Fridland, as well as Alicia Wassink, Betsy Evans, and Lauren Hall-Lew.

Valerie Fridland

Valerie Fridland is Professor of Linguistics and former Director of Graduate Studies in the English department at University of Nevada, Reno. As a sociolinguist, her main focus is on varieties of American English. Most of her research investigates variation in vowel production and vowel perception across the Northern, Southern and Western regions of the U.S. In addition to authoring Sociophonetics, Valerie is lead editor of the three volume series Speech in the Western States from Duke University Press, along with co-editors Tyler Kendall, Alicia Wassink, Betsy Evans, and Lauren Hall-Lew, and she has a popular linguistics book coming out with Viking/Penguin Press. Beyond these titles, her work is regularly published in journals such as American Speech, Journal of Sociolinguistics, Language Variation and Change, Lingua, and Journal of Phonetics and appears in a number of edited collections. She also has a monthly blog, Language in the Wild, that appears in Psychology Today and her video lecture series, Language and Society, is featured with The Great Courses.