Janet Holmes holds a personal Chair in Linguistics at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Her sociolinguistics teaching focuses on workplace discourse, New Zealand English, and language and gender. She is Director of the Wellington Language in the Workplace (LWP) project and a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand. Her many publications include The Handbook of Language and Gender (edited with M. Meyerhoff, Wiley-Blackwell, 2003), Leadership, Discourse and Ethnicity (with M. Marra and B. Vine, 2011), and An Introduction to Sociolinguistics, Fourth Edition (2013).

Kirk Hazen is Professor of Linguistics and director of the West Virginia Dialect Project at West Virginia University. He is the author of Dialect Change and Maintenance on the Outer Banks (with W. Wolfram and N. Schilling-Estes, 1998), Identity and Ethnicity in the Rural South: A Sociolinguistic View through Past and Present Be (2000), and An Introduction to Language (Wiley-Blackwell, 2014).