For this very first episode of Linguistics Now, I am thrilled to announce my first guest - Professor David Britain!

David Britain is a sociolinguist and dialectologist in the Department of English at the University of Bern in Switzerland and a linguist I have admired and read for a very long time.

His research interests are in the following areas:

• Variation and change in contemporary English, especially the Englishes of East Anglia, the South of England, the Southern Hemisphere (esp. New Zealand, Australia and the Falkland Islands) and Micronesia, as well as lesser-known varieties of English;
• The dialectological consequences of geographical mobility, especially dialect contact, dialect accommodation, diffusion, supralocalisation, second dialect acquisition, koineisation and new dialect formation;
• The dialectology – human geography interface, especially with respect to mobility, isolation and the urban-rural dichotomy;
• Language variation 'on the move': mobile methods in variationist sociolinguistics and the effects of walking, driving, travelling on variation;
• Language ideologies as they relate to non-standard dialects;
• Language and dialect obsolescence.
• ​Dialectological data collection using mobile phone apps.

You can follow him:

• on ResearchGate
• on Twitter

I would like to thank him for being such a great guest - I could listen to him for hours, and I think you will feel the same too!