My research is interdisciplinary, drawing on theories and methods from quantitative, qualitative and experimental traditions to address fundamental questions about the relationship between language and society. I focus in particular on how people produce and perceive socially meaningful patterns of variation in language, with a special interest in language as it relates to the construction and representation of gender, sexuality and national belonging. I have experience using a variety of different sociolinguistic research methods, including variationist, interactional, experimental, and ethnographic approaches. I have conducted field research in Israel, South Africa, the United States and the UK, and have published on studies related to language variation and change, language style, language and identity, and sociolinguistic cognition, among other topics.

Language, Selfhood, and Belonging

I have a longstanding interest in the relationship between language and people’s sense of self and their feelings of belonging: how speaking a language in a particular way gets bound up with what it means to “belong” to a particular community or place. This was the topic of my previous research in Israel, where I explored the relationship between gender, sexuality and national identity and how that relationship played out through language. This is also the subject of more recent work I have done with Stamatina Katsiveli exploring the sociolinguistics of selfhood among queer men in Greece (see my plenary talk at the Sociolinguistics Symposium in 2022) and research that I conducted with Tommaso Milani and Roey Gafter looking at sexuality and discourses of citizenship in Israel and Palestine. From 2015-2019, I also led a British Academy funded project (with Tommaso Milani and Quentin Williams) looking at representations of gender and sexuality in the English, Afrikaans and isiXhosa print media in South Africa. Prior to this, I conducted collaborative work with Paul Baker on gender and ethnicity in the UK, and with Ian Bekker on language and gender ideologies among White English- and Afrikaans-speaking South Africans. See my publications for further details.

Authoritarian and neo–Nationalist Rhetorics

My work on language and belonging has led me to be interested in the production and circulation of nationalist discourses, how these discourses change over time, and how they have come to predominate contemporary politics. I am currently working with Patricia Purtschert on a project examining how discourses of “freedom” are deployed in far-right political messaging in Switzerland. Together with Julia Eckert, I am also convening a working group of political and linguistic anthropologists who are interested in understanding the recent rise of authoritarianism globally and the discursive strategies that support and sustain it. With Tommaso Milani, I am co-editing a special issue on the role of gender in contemporary neo-nationalist politics.

Variation, Affect, and the Body

Over the past five years, I have also been investigating the relationship between linguistic variation and the embodied expression of emotion. Together with Sophie Holmes-Elliott, I have published papers exploring how bodily stereotypes of social class in the UK (i.e., beliefs about how working- and middle-class people hold and move their bodies) are linked to patterns of segmental linguistic variation. More recently, I have been working with Nicolai Pharao on a project investigating the extent to which facial expressions act as the source for sociolinguistic meanings. Across all of this work, my goal is to try and understand how indexical meanings first emerge and subsequently diffuse across communities.

Perception, Attitudes, and Bias

My recent work on variation and embodiment is related to work I’ve done over the past twenty years examining how social meanings come to be associated with language and the social effects of such perceptual patterns. This has included work on the role of stereotypes in sociolinguistic processing, on the functioning of the so-called “sociolinguistic monitor” (with Sue Fox and Isabelle Buchstaller), and on salience across different levels of linguistic structure. See my publications for further details.

From 2017-2021, I was Principal Investigator of the Accent Bias in Britain, which aimed to explore the relationship between accent and life outcomes in the UK. Together with my co-investigators Devyani Sharma and Dominic Watt, we did this by examining the extent to which accent interferes with a listener’s ability to objectively evaluate a job candidate’s suitability for employment. Bringing together insights from sociolinguistics, social psychology and labour market economics, the project involved a range of different experimental studies designed to identify the presence and impact of accent bias in the real world. We also developed tools and training materials to help tackle accent bias in different professional contexts. For further details about the project and our findings, see the Accent Bias Britain website.

Building on my work in Accent Bias Britain, I am part of a new European interdisciplinary research network that explores the neurocognitive and social impacts of foreign-accented speech in human-human and human-AI interactions. My research in this network focuses on foreign accent bias in legal proceedings.

Since July 2025, Adrian Leemann and I have been leading a new project looking at the relationship between sound aesthetics and social attitudes to speech in Switzerland, Germany, and Austria. Similar to my previous work, the goal of the project is to understand how social evaluations of linguistic variation arise and the role that different social and structural forces play in this process.