Janet Holmes holds a personal Chair in Linguistics at Victoria University of Wellington and is Director of the Wellington Language in the Workplace Project and the Wellington Corpus of Spoken New Zealand English. She is the author of numerous books and articles, including
Introduction to Sociolinguistics (second edition, 2001) and
Women, Men and Politeness (1995). She is editor of
Gendered Speech in Social Context (2000).
Miriam Meyerhoff is Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh, before which she was Assistant Professor at the University of Hawai'i, Manoa. She has published articles on language and gender, language change in creoles, and is the author of Constraints on Null Subjects in Bislama (Vanuatu) (2000).