Dennis Preston

co-editor of Variation in Indigenous Minority Languages

November 4, 2015

Dennis R. Preston is Regents Professor, Oklahoma State University and University Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Michigan State University and has been a visiting professor at the Universities of Hawaii, Arizona, Michigan, Copenhagen, and Berkeley and a Fulbright Researcher in Poland and Brazil. He was Director of the 2003 Linguistic Society of America Institute, President of the American Dialect Society, and has served on the Executive Boards of those societies and others, as well as the editorial boards of numerous journals and panels of granting agencies. He is a member of the advisory committees to several international research projects and is invited frequently for presentations in both academic and popular venues. His work focuses on sociolinguistics and dialectology, including four recent NSF grants, two in folk linguistics and two in language variation and change. His most recent book-length publications are, with Nancy Niedzielski, Folk linguistics (2000), with Daniel Long, A handbook of perceptual dialectology, Volume II (2002), Needed research in American dialects (2003), with Brian Joseph and Carol G. Preston, Linguistic diversity in Michigan and Ohio (2005), and with James Stanford, Variation in indigenous languages (2009). 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.

Variation in Indigenous Minority Languages collects, for the first time, work done in the variationist sociolinguistic model on a number of the world's less well-studied, minority languages and varieties. The motivation is not only to fill the gap in such research but al to shed light on governing factors of variation, both linguistic and social, that have not surfaced in the study of the more mainstream languages to which this methodology has been historically applied.

URL: https://library.okstate.edu/news/celebratingbooks/2010-honorees/dennis-preston

Last Updated: 14 January 2022