Sali A. Tagliamonte is a Professor in the Linguistics Department at the University of Toronto, Canada. She is author of Making Waves: The Story of Variationist Sociolinguistics (Wiley-Blackwell to appear); Roots of English (CUP 2013), Variationist Sociolinguistics: Change, observation, interpretation (Wiley-Blackwell 2012); Analysing Sociolinguistic Variation (CUP 2006) and co-author of African American English in the Diaspora: Tense and Aspect (Blackwell 2001). She has published on African American varieties, British, Irish and Canadian dialects, teen language and television. Her forthcoming book, Making Waves, is based on conversational interviews with 43 famous Sociolinguists and offers a unique insider’s perspective on the human side to an academic field. Her vibrant research program currently focuses on morph-syntactic and discourse-pragmatic linguistic features and uses cross-variety and apparent time comparisons of vernacular spoken corpora spanning the UK and Canada to explain how and why language changes.