Deborah Tannen is university professor and professor of linguistics at Georgetown University. She has been McGraw Distinguished Lecturer at Princeton University. Her many books include Talking Voices: Repetition, Dialogue, and Imagery in Conversational Discourse; Gender and Discourse; Conversational Style: Analyzing Talk Among Friends; You Just Don't Understand; and, most recently, I Only Say This Because I Love You. She has received a Rockefeller Humanities Fellowship and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Her work has been translated into 29 languages.

James E. Alatis is distinguished professor of linguistics and modern Greek and dean emeritus, School of Languages and Linguistics at Georgetown University, where he has also been director of the MAT Program and vice-chair of the linguistics department.