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.

Below is information on my current projects.

Navigating Exclusion: Gender, Sexuality, and the Sociolinguistics of Belonging (NavEx)

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. The NavEx project (2026-2030, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation) combines ethnographic and sociophonetic methods to examine how queer individuals in Poland and India resist the marginalizing effects of dominant national discourses and how they make strategic use of sociophonetic variability to position themselves as legitimate members of the nation. Through its focus on the details of linguistic practice, NavEx seeks to break new ground in the empirical study of language as a form of social resistance and to further the development of theories of counter-conduct more generally. My work on NavEx follows in the footsteps 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 was also the subject of more recent work I have done with Stamatina Katsiveli exploring the sociolinguistics of selfhood among queer men in Greece and research that I conducted with Tommaso Milani and Roey Gafter looking at sexuality and discourses of citizenship in Israel and Palestine.

Social Consequences of Accents: Inferred Credibility in the Courtroom (SoCoA)

For the past 20 years, I have been conducting research on the perceptual associations between linguistic patterns and social meaning, and the social effects that these associations can have. 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. In the SoCoA project (2026-2029, funded by the Swiss Secretariat of Education, Research, and Innovation as part of the Horizon Europe HUM.AI.N-ACCENT Doctoral Network), we interrogate the cognitive processes that underlie differences in how foreign versus non-foreign accents are evaluated in high-stakes institutional settings. Using cutting-edge experimental methods (including virtual reality and different eye-tracking measures), our aim is to disentangle the social, psychological, and processing factors that determine how accents shape our judgments about people.

SoCoA is inspired directly by the Accent Bias in Britain (ABB) project (funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council), which I directed from 2017-2021. The goal of ABB was 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. For further details about the project and our findings, see the Accent Bias Britain website.

Sound Effects: Tracing the Origins of Social Meaning in Phonetic Variation

Together with Adrian Leemann, I lead the Sound Effects project (funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation), which explores how regional language features are perceived in German-speaking Switzerland, Germany and Austria. The aim of the project is to investigate how different aspects of people’s lived experiences (such as their personal backgrounds and beliefs) as well as aesthetic characteristics of speech (sounds that are perceived as sounding “harsh” versus “smooth”) together affect social judgments. Through a series of explicit and implicit attitudes tests using both real and constructed language patterns, we hope to identify the role that sound symbolism may play in the formation of listener reactions. For further details about the project, see the Sound Effects website.

Does (embodied) Emotion Cause Sociolinguistic Variation? (EmoVar)

A collaboration with Nicolai Pharao, EmoVar (funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation) considers how cultural stereotypes about the body and embodiment may affect the origin and diffusion of sound change. Using sophisticated face-tracking technology, we investigate the extent to which patterns of acoustic variation in speech correlate with minute movements in the face (such as the degree of lip stretching or jaw dropping). Our aim is to determine whether culturally meaningful facial expressions could be the source of sociolinguistically meaningful sound patterns. Our current experiments examine the link between speech and embodiment in Danish and Swiss German. My work on EmoVar is related to my prior research with Sophie Holmes-Elliott on 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.

Authoritarian and neo–Nationalist Rhetorics

My research 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 (funded by the University of Bern Humanities Strategic Research Fund) 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 (funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation) 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.