Kerry Hull was a Professor in Religious Education at Brigham Young University when this was written. He earned a BA in Spanish and BA in French from Utah State University. He received an MS in applied linguistics from Georgetown University in 1993. He completed a PhD in linguistic anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin in 2003. His academic interests include Maya linguistics and anthropology, Polynesian linguistics, historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, and Maya epigraphic studies. He has conducted linguistic, ethnographic, and archaeological fieldwork in Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, and Honduras. He has also carried out linguistic fieldwork on the Ua Pou dialect of Northern Marquesan and on the dialect used on the island of Raivavae in the Austral chain in French Polynesia.