Dennis Preston

Dennis R. Preston is Regents Professor and Co-Director of the Center for Oklahoma Studies, Oklahoma State University and University Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Michigan State University; he has been a visiting scholar at Osaka Shoin Women’s College and the Universities of Canterbury (New Zealand), Hawai’i, Arizona, Michigan, Copenhagen, Colorado, Indiana University Southeast, SUNY Oswego, Berkeley, and Chicago 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 of 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), with James Stanford, Variation in indigenous languages (2009), with Nancy Niedzielski, A reader in sociophonetics (2010), and, with Alexei Prikhodkine, Responses to language varieties (2015). He is an Erskine Fellow of the University of Canterbury (New Zealand) and a Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and the Linguistic Society of America and was awarded the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Polish Republic in 2004.