Peter Auer is professor emeritus at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität, Freiburg (Germany), where until recently he held the chair of Germanic Linguistics. He has also taught German and General Linguistics at the universities of Konstanz, Saarbrücken and Hamburg, and was a visiting professor at the universities of Helsinki, Stockholm and the EHESS (Paris), as well as a fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study. His research has covered a wide range of fields in linguistics, including bilingualism, dialectology, phonology and phonetics, the syntax of spoken language, conversation analysis, gaze analysis and sociolinguistics. He has published more than 250 scholarly articles in journals and edited volumes and is the (co-)editor/(co-)author of 29 books.
David Britain obtained his PhD in Linguistics from the University of Essex in the United Kingdom in 1991 and worked at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand and the University of Essex before becoming Professor of Modern English Linguistics in the Department of English at the University of Bern in Switzerland in 2010. His research interests include language variation and change, varieties of English (particularly in England, the Southern Hemisphere and the Pacific), dialect contact and attrition, the formation of new dialects, second dialect acquisition, and the use of new technologies, such as smartphone applications, in collecting dialect data. He is also actively engaged in research at the interface between dialectology and human geography, particularly with regard to space and place, urban and rural contexts, and the role of mobility. He served as Associate Editor of the Journal of Sociolinguistics from 2008 to 2017, co-authored „Linguistic perspectives on a variable English morpheme: let’s talk about –s“ (Palgrave, 2019), and has forthcoming co-authored works on both Micronesian and Falkland Islands Englishes. He currently leads CURLEW – a major international project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, which is conducting a new national survey of the dialects of England and Wales.
Prof. Dr Lars Bülow holds the Chair of German Linguistics at the Institute of German Philology at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. In 2020, he completed his habilitation at the University of Salzburg in the field of German Linguistics. His habilitation thesis is entitled ‘Inter- and intra-individual variation in the change of the Bavarian dialects of Austria. Empirical Findings and Conceptual Considerations’. His doctoral thesis, for which he received multiple awards and which he completed in 2017 at the University of Passau, deals with variation and change in German morphology. From 2016 to 2018, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Salzburg on the sub-project ‘Variation and Change in Dialectal Varieties in Austria (in real and apparent time)’ within the Collaborative Research Centre ‘German in Austria. Variation – Contact – Perception’ (F 60). In this context, he gained extensive experience in the collection, processing and analysis of dialectal language data. As an expert in dialectology and sociolinguistics of variation, he investigates dialectal variation and language change at all linguistic levels, including phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax, lexis and pragmatics. During his academic career, he has taught at several universities in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
He has also held positions as a research fellow and visiting professor at the universities of Modena, Milan, Groningen and Cambridge.
Leonie Cornips is a sociolinguist (specialising in syntactic variation), who has been affiliated with the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1994 and was appointed professor of ‘Language and Culture in Limburg’ at Maastricht University in 2011. Her research focuses on multilingualism, dialects and emerging varieties in the Netherlands, and on the construction of local identity through language practices, including linguistic place-making and a sense of belonging. She is currently investigating non-human animal languages, in particular intraspecies and interspecies interaction among cows, challenging the a priori distinction between human (culture) and animal (nature). She conceptualises language as a multimodal, embodied and multisensory phenomenon and is conducting ethnographic fieldwork on industrial dairy farms in the Netherlands for this purpose.
Arnulf Deppermann is head of the Pragmatics department at the Leibniz Institute for the German Language (IDS Mannheim, Germany) and professor of German linguistics at the University of Mannheim. He has studied a wide variety of topics and phenomena in the fields of conversation analysis, interactional linguistics and multimodal interaction analysis. His current research focuses on how interactional histories influence the development of routines and how speech features into the task structures of practical activities. Recently, he has been working on theatre rehearsals, psychotherapy and driving lessons. Theoretically, he is interested in issues of action ascription and in the relationship between social interaction and cognitive processes. His other research includes studies on understanding and intersubjectivity in interaction, grammar and semantics in interaction, narrative and identity, and the coordination of speech and embodiment in multimodal interaction.
Leibniz Institute for the German Language
PF 101621
68016 Mannheim
Germany
Pia Quist is Professor of Sociolinguistics at the University of Copenhagen and Director of TRANSITION – Centre for Changing Urban and Rural Lives, funded by the Danish National Research Foundation. Her research focuses on language, place, mobility and social change, with particular attention to dialects and linguistic practices in urban and rural contexts. She usually works in interdisciplinary research teams and has collaborated with scholars in history, geography, sociology and literary studies. Her current work explores how a transition perspective can contribute to rethinking the relationship between speakers, places and linguistic practices.
Since 2008, Beat Siebenhaar has held a W2 professorship in German Linguistics, specialising in variety linguistics, at the Institute of German Studies within the Faculty of Philology at the University of Leipzig. Among other roles, he was a research assistant at the German Department of the University of Zurich under Professor Sonderegger and premier assistant to Professor Keller at the Laboratoire d’Analyse Informatique de la Parole (LAIP), Section d’Informatique et des Méthodes Mathématiques, at the University of Lausanne. From 2003 to 2004, Beat Siebenhaar was a senior research fellow on the Swiss National Science Foundation project ”Quantitative Approaches to a Linguistic Geography of Swiss German Prosody” under Professor Werlen at the Institute of Linguistics, University of Bern. From 2007 to 2008, he held the W3 professorship in place of Professor Auer at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau.
His main areas of research are linguistic variation, dialectology, sociolinguistics, phonetics, prosody, lifespan change, interactive writing and code-switching.
Beat Siebenhaar has authored numerous publications, including the paper “Variational Linguistics, Dialectology, Sociolinguistics, Phonetics, Prosody, Lifespan Change, Interactive Writing, Code-Switching” in the conference proceedings for the P&P20 – 2024 conference in Halle/Saale, edited by Grawunder and Mousavi in 2025.
Sali A. Tagliamonte is the Canada Research Chair in Language Variation and Change and Professor of Linguistics at the University of Toronto. She is a member of the Royal Society of Canada and a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America. Her research focuses on morphosyntactic and discourse-pragmatic variation, using cross-community and apparent-time approaches to study language change, and grounds her interpretations in sociolinguistic theory, historical linguistics, structural theory and typology. She has written eight books, including the forthcoming “Sociolinguistic Typology and Language Change”, and edits the Cambridge series “Studies in Language Variation and Change”, published by Cambridge University Press.
Evelyn Ziegler is Professor of German Linguistics at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany. She holds a PhD in German Linguistics from the University of Heidelberg, Germany. Her research focusses on interactional sociolinguistics, digital communication, linguistic landscapes and language attitudes. Currently, she is exploring mining language in Germany and the UK together with Natalie Braber (Nottingham Trent University), John Bellamy (Manchester Metropolitan University) and Nantke Pecht (University of Münster).