Dennis Baron
Dennis Baron (PhD in English, UMich, 1971), is Professor of English and linguistics at the University of Illinois. He writes on the history of the English language; issues of language policy; and language legislation, and minority-language rights. His books include Grammar and Good Taste: Reforming the American Language (Yale Univ. Press, 1982); Grammar and Gender (Yale, 1986); and The English-Only Question: An Official Language for Americans (Yale, 1990). He is also the author of Declining Grammar (NCTE 1988) and Guide to Home Language Repair (NCTE 1994). He has written op-ed essays on language issues for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Chronicle of Higher Education; and Inside Higher Education. He has discussed language on the air (everything from NPR and the CBC to the Joan Rivers Show); with Dick Bailey and Jeff Kaplan he wrote the infamous "Linguists' Brief," the one amicus brief singled out for particular scorn by Justice Antonin Scalia in his majority opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller last Spring; and for the past two years he's been writing a blog, the Web of Language. His latest book, From Pencils to Pixels: Reading, Writing and the Digital Revolution, will be published by Oxford University Press in 2009.