Rate My Professor Valerie Fridland

Valerie Fridland is a Professor of Linguistics in the Department of English at the University of Nevada, Reno. She earned her Ph.D. in Sociolinguistics from Michigan State University in 1998 and her B.S. in Languages and Linguistics from Georgetown University in 1990. Having served as a faculty member at the University of Nevada, Reno for over 20 years, Fridland's research centers on Linguistics, with a focus on American dialectology and regional vowel variation. Her work investigates how gender and ethnicity intersect with linguistic variation, including vowel perception and production across U.S. dialects. Funded by nearly $100,000 from the National Science Foundation, her studies cover major vowel shifts in the North, South, and West, as well as speech patterns in Native American, Latinx, Alaskan, and Hawaiian communities.

Fridland co-directs the Vowels in America project, a collaboration with the University of Oregon that combines sociolinguistic field methods and phonetic experimentation to analyze dialectal sound differences influenced by social factors such as age, gender, class, and ethnicity. She is the author of Like, Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English (2023), which explores the functional and historical roles of linguistic quirks. Fridland has received two National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships: $60,000 in 2022 to research speech habits and language evolution, and one in 2024 to complete Why We Talk Funny, an interdisciplinary examination of accents' science and history, forthcoming from Viking Penguin in 2026 or 2027. In 2019, she earned the American Speech Roger Shuy Best Paper Award for Vowel Dynamics in the Southern Vowel Shift. Notable publications include Sociophonetics (2021, with Tyler Kendall, Cambridge University Press), Durational and spectral differences in American English vowels: dialect variation within and across regions (2014, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, with Tyler Kendall), and English in the Western States (2016, in Listening to the Past, Cambridge University Press, with Tyler Kendall).