This insightful 2009 study proposes a unified theory of speech through which conflicting ideas about language might be understood. It is founded on a number of key points, such as the continuum of linguistic behaviour, extensive variation in language features, the importance of regional and social proximity to shared linguistic production, and differential frequency as a key factor in linguistic production both in regional and social groups and in text corpora. The study shows how this new linguistics of speech does not reject rules in favour of language use, or reject language use in favour of rules; rather, it shows how rules can come from language as people use it. Written in a clear, engaging style and containing invaluably accessible introductions to complex theoretical concepts, this work will be of great interest to students and scholars of sociolinguistics, dialectology and corpus linguistics.

Professor Kretzschmar (Ph.D., University of Chicago, 1980) began his career as a medievalist (dissertation on Middle Scots poetry, medieval literary theory), and has over time become more associated with English Language Studies. He is the editor of the Linguistic Atlas Project, a national center for survey research on American English. He also has a long-term sociolinguistic field site in Roswell, GA, called Roswell Voices; that project is the first (and so far only) North American member of the European Union's Living Laboratories network, which promotes public/private partnerships involving technology and innovation. He was President of the American Dialect Society from 2007-2009. He edited the Journal of English Linguistics for fifteen years, and now serves on a number of editorial boards. He is coeditor of the Oxford Dictionary of Pronunciation for Current English (2001), and provides American pronunciations for the online Oxford English Dictionary and for various dictionaries in the Oxford US Dictionaries program. He has published numerous articles on medieval literature, American English, language variation, and humanities computing. His Handbook of the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States was published by the University of Chicago Press in 1993, and his Introduction to Quantitative Analysis of Linguistic Survey Data by Sage in 1996. A collection of essays from his UGA seminar on literary stylistics was published as a special issue of Language and Literature (2001). His The Linguistics of Speech, which demonstrates the relationship between language behavior and complexity science, was published by Cambridge University Press (2009). He directed the UGA Linguistics Program (1996-99), and developed and served as the director of the UGA Computer/Information Literacy Program from 1999-2001. Currently he is pursuing his research and teaching on American English, language variation, and computer methods for description, analysis, and presentation of language data from literary and non-literary sources. His current grant-funded research includes a major NEH grant to preserve thousands of hours of audio-taped spoken interviews by conversion to computer storage.

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