Jim Stanford is a sociolinguist who focuses on dialects and quantitative analyses of language variation and change in underrepresented indigenous minority languages, including Sui, Hmong, and other languages of China and southeast Asia. He also conducts fieldwork on English dialects of New England. His research includes acoustic sociophonetics, sociotonetics, tone languages, endangered languages, dialect contact, gender, exogamy, kinship and social identity, child dialect acquisition, dialect geography, urban dialectology, rural dialectology, and computational methods for linguistic research.