Wolfram Honored for Outreach

Dr. Walt Wolfram, director of the North Carolina Language and Life Project, received the Linguistics, Language and the Public Award from the Linguistic Society of America (LSA). This award honors a body of work that effectively increases public awareness and understanding of linguistics and language, including books, documentary films and articles in periodicals. Wolfram will accept the award in January during the annual meeting in Baltimore.

Wolfram, the William C. Friday Distinguished Professor of English Linguistics, has pioneered research on social and ethnic dialects since the 1960s, authoring or co-authoring 20 books and more than 250 articles on social and ethnic dialects of American English. He has focused on applying sociolinguistic information to social and educational problems and on disseminating knowledge about dialects to the public. He has been involved in producing television documentaries on dialect diversity, constructing museum exhibits and developing dialect awareness curricula for the schools and general public. He is a former president of both LSA and the American Dialect Society.