Zannie Bock is Associate Professor in the Linguistics Department at the University of the Western Cape. Her current publications include work on narrative and discourse analysis, with a focus on racializing discourses among university students, emerging styles in youth instant messaging chats and the ways in which affect and stance are encoded in texts. Earlier publications include discourse analyses of testimonies given before South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. She also has a long-standing interest in adult education, curricula and materials development and is the project co-ordinator and co-editor of the first southern African textbook in the field, Language, Society and Communication: An Introduction (2014).

Cecelia Cutler is Professor of Linguistics at Lehman College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her work explores how people project identity and stance through linguistic style choices. Currently, she is working on a collaborative NSF-funded, corpus-building project on language variation in New York City (with Christina Tortora, Michael Newman and Bill Haddican). Her monograph, White Hip Hoppers, Language and Identity in Post-Modern America appeared in 2014 and her co-edited volume, Language Contact in Africa and the African Diaspora in the Americas appeared in 2017.

Nausheena Dalwai is currently Lecturer in the English Department of the Al Kharj Armed Forces Military Hospital Nursing Institute in Al Kharj, Saudi Arabia. She completed her undergraduate, Honours and Masters degrees at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. The topic of her Masters thesis was “Social Networking Among UWC Students: Instant Messaging Genres and Registers.” Her research interests include discourse analysis, and social media texting styles, norms, and registers.

Ana Deumert is a Professor at the University of Cape Town. Her research program is located within the broad field of African sociolinguistics and has a strong transdisciplinary focus. She has worked on the history of Afrikaans (The Dynamics of Cape Dutch, 2004), co-authored Introducing Sociolinguistics (with Rajend Mesthrie, Joan Swann and William Leap, 2009) and the Dictionary of Sociolinguistics (with Joan Swann, Rajend Mesthrie and Theresa Lillis, 2004). Her latest book looks at mobile communication from a global perspective (Sociolinguistics and Mobile Communication, 2014). Her current work explores the use of language in global political movements. She is co-editor of IMPACT – Studies in Language and Society (with Kristine Horner), co-editor of Cambridge Approaches to Language Contact (with Salikoko Mufwene) and co-editor of Edinburgh Sociolinguistics (with Paul Kerswill). She is a recipient of the Humboldt Research Award (2016) and is an NRF-rated scientist.

Cécile Evers lectures in anthropology at the University of California, Riverside. Central themes in her research include the cultural citizenship of French Muslim youth, their language practices, and their religious trajectories. She is currently working on a postdoctoral research project entitled “Alienated from home: orthodox Muslim young women retreat from Marseille to the Muslim world.” This project examines how young Muslim women from Marseille are relocating to their parents’ home countries, and sometimes other countries in the Muslim world, in their search for cultural belonging and spiritual fulfillment.

Matt Garley is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at York College of the City University of New York, as well as a member of the doctoral faculty in the linguistics program at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. In his research, he uses both qualitative and quantitative (corpus) methods to investigate the properties of varieties of English, the linguistics of hip hop culture, the linguistics of computer-mediated communication, and writing systems. His present research project involves aspects of language contact and linguistic change in Latinx hip hop culture in the US. His work has appeared in Discourse, Context, and Media, as well as in edited volumes.

Lars Hinrichs is Associate Professor of English language and linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin. His doctoral work (PhD 2006, Freiburg, Germany) was a discourse analysis of Creole-English code-switching in Jamaican e-mails. In other work, he has investigated sociophonetic aspects of speech in the Jamaican-Canadian community, the effect of prescriptivism on morphosyntactic alternation in standard English corpora, and variation and change in Texas English. His work has appeared in journals such as Language, English Language and Linguistics, English World-Wide and others.

Jamie Shinhee Lee is Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Michigan-Dearborn and editor of World Englishes in Pop Culture (with Yamuna Kachru, 2006) and English in Asian Popular Culture (with Andrew Moody, 2012). Her research interests include world Englishes, language and popular culture, globalization and education policy, bilingualism, and Korean pragmatics/discourse analysis. Her articles have appeared in Asian Englishes, Critical Discourse Studies, Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, English Today, English World-Wide, Journal of Creative Communications, Journal of Pragmatics, Language in Society, Language Research, World Englishes as well as in several edited collections.

Kristin Vold Lexander is Postdoctoral Fellow at MultiLing, Centre for Multilingualism in Society across the Lifespan at the Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies, University of Oslo. Her research focuses on digital media and multilingualism, and she has worked with digital literacy practices in African languages and orthographies in the Senegalese context. Currently, she studies language use and mediated communication in Norwegian-Senegalese families in Norway. Her work has appeared in Journal of Sociolinguistics, New Media and Society, and Journal des Africanistes, as well as in edited volumes.

Unn Røyneland is Professor of Scandinavian Languages and Deputy Director at MultiLing, Center for Multilingualism in Society across the Lifespan at the Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies, University of Oslo. Her research interests include language and dialect contact, new dialect formation, dialect leveling and youth language. Central themes of her current research are the emergence and enregisterment of multiethnolectal speech styles among adolescents in multilingual Oslo, language attitudes, ideologies and language, and identity. Her work has appeared in the International Journal of Bilingualism, the International Journal of the Sociology of Language, as well as several edited volumes.

Christopher Stroud is Senior Professor of Linguistics and Director for the Centre for Multilingualism and Diversities Research (CMDR) at the University of the Western Cape. He is also Professor of Transnational Bilingualism at Stockholm University. His current research focuses on practices and ideologies of multilingualism in socially and politically transforming economies in Southern Africa. In this context, he is exploring the notion of linguistic citizenship as a way of rethinking the role of language in brokering diversity in contemporary polities in a decolonial framework. His work has appeared in Journal of Sociolinguistics, The International Journal of Bilingualism, International Journal of Bilingualism and Bilingual Education, Language Policy, International Journal of the Sociology of Language, Linguistic Landscape, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, as well as several edited volumes.

Karl Swinehart is Assistant Professor of Comparative Humanities, University of Louisville. His research concerns multilingualism and language contact in popular culture, with a particular interest in the role of state and non-state institutions in the formation of linguistic registers. His current research among indigenous language media professionals and educators in Bolivia addresses relationships between institutions, linguistic practice, and social change. His work has appeared in the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Language and Communication, Language in Society, and Social Text.