William C. Friday Award honoring Dr. Walt Wolfram

The Park Scholarships Class of 2025 is excited to give the Park Scholarships William C. Friday Award to Dr. Walt Wolfram.

The William C. Friday Award, established in 2000 and named for the former president of the University of North Carolina System, is an annual honor presented by the senior class of Park Scholars on behalf of the entire Park Scholarships program. This award honors Friday’s dedication and excellence in scholarship, leadership, service, and character, and recognizes individuals who emulate Friday’s dedication to those principles. Each year’s award recipient is invited to speak at a campus-wide event.

Dr. Walt Wolfram is William C. Friday Distinguished University professor at NC State, where he also directs the North Carolina Language and Life Project. He has pioneered research on social and ethnic dialects since the 1960s and published 24 books, eight edited collections and more than 300 articles. Over the last two decades, he and his students have conducted more than 3,500 sociolinguistic interviews with residents of North Carolina and beyond, primarily under funding from the National Science Foundation. In addition to his research interests, Professor Wolfram is particularly interested in the application of sociolinguistic information to the public, as executive producer of 15 television documentaries, the construction of six museum exhibits, and the development of innovative formal and informal materials related to language diversity.

Host or Publisher Park Scholarships at NC State