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G. Tucker Childs is a professor and chair in the Applied Linguistics Department of Portland State University in Portland, Oregon, where he teaches courses in phonetics, phonology, language variation, pidgins and creoles, African American English, and sociolinguistics. He and several of his students have done research on the dialects of Portland, realized as the ‘Portland Dialect Study’ (www.pds.pdx.edu). His interests, however, focus on African languages, including the pidgins and new urban varieties spoken on the continent, his most recent book in that area being An Introduction to African Languages (2003). More recently he has been documenting dying languages in Guinea (www.ling.pdx.edu/childs/MDP.html) and Sierra Leone (www.pdx.edu/dkb), for which he recently received the Kenneth L. Hale Award from the LSA. He has taught at universities in the United States, Canada, Europe and Africa, and has been a visiting researcher at France’s National Council for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris, at Fourah Bay College (Sierra Leone), and at the University of Conakry (Guinea).