Notes on Contributors
Axel Bohmann is Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Cologne. He holds a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin (2017) and has done post-doctoral work at the University of Freiburg. His research focuses on the sociolinguistics of English in global settings combining qualitative and quantitative approaches. He has published his work in journals such as World Englishes, the Journal of Sociolinguistics, and Language.
Amanda Cole is Assistant Professor in Sociolinguistics in the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics at the University of Cambridge. She teaches, researches and supervises student projects in the field of sociolinguistics. Her research interests include language variation and change, language attitudes and ideologies, and perceptual dialectology, focusing on regional dialects in the UK, particularly, in South East England.
Mel Evans is Associate Professor in English Language with Digital at the University of Leeds, UK. Her research explores the relationship between language, technology and identity from a transhistorical perspective, as well as developing digital approaches to investigate this theme. She is co-editor of Message and Medium: English language practices across old and new media, 2020 (with Caroline Tagg), the author of Royal Voices: Language and Power in Tudor England, 2020, and is currently editing the correspondence of Aphra Behn for Cambridge University Press.
Mirka Honkanen worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the English Department of the University of Freiburg until 2024, when she decided to leave academia and pursue a career in administration and science management. Her research focused on World Englishes in diasporic and digitally mediated settings, combining qualitative investigations with large corpora.
Ella Jeffries is Lecturer in Linguistics in the Department of Language and Linguistics at the University of Essex. She teaches on a range of modules such as Foundations of Sociolinguistics, English Language in the Media, and Language and Gender. Her interests lie in the field of sociolinguistics, with a particular focus on regional accent variation in the UK. Her ongoing research looks into children’s developing perceptual awareness of regional accent differences and how attitudes towards speakers with different regional accents develop throughout childhood.
Samuli Kaislaniemi is a Senior Researcher at the University of Eastern Finland. He works on Early Modern English letters and letter-writing, combining historical sociolinguistics with manuscript studies. He is a compiler of the Corpus of Early English Correspondence, and a contributor to the Oxford Handbook of Southeast Asian Englishes, and the New Cambridge History of the English Language.
Mikko Laitinen is Professor of English at the University of Eastern Finland. His research focuses on digital social networks and World Englishes. He is currently leading a project on the weak-tie hypothesis in complex digital social networks, funded by the Research Council of Finland. He is an elected member of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters and one of the principal investigators in the national digital humanities research infrastructure, FIN-CLARIAH. For societal outreach, he recently completed a project for the Prime Minister’s Office on the role of English in Finland.
Sven Leuckert is Post-Doctoral Researcher and Research Associate at TUD Dresden University of Technology. His main research interests include World Englishes, Mountaineering English, Computer-Mediated Communication, and language and horror. He has recently published Indian Englishes in the Twenty-First Century: Unity and Diversity in Lexicon and Morphosyntax (Cambridge University Press, 2023) together with Claudia Lange, Tobias Bernaisch, and Asya Yurchenko, and is co-author of the textbook Corpus Linguistics for World Englishes: A Guide for Research (with Claudia Lange; Routledge, 2020).
Lea Meriläinen is Senior Lecturer in English linguistics at the University of Eastern Finland. Her research interests cover second language acquisition, English language learning and teaching, learner corpora, and the interface between learner English and world Englishes from the perspective of language contact and acquisition phenomena. She has published in peer-reviewed journals (e.g. English World-Wide, World Englishes, International Journal of Learner Corpus Research) and edited volumes (e.g. CUP, OUP, de Gruyter, Routledge).
Heli Paulasto is Senior Lecturer in English linguistics at the University of Eastern Finland. She specializes in English language contacts, variation and change in multilingual contexts. She is the author of Welsh English (de Gruyter, 2021) with Rob Penhallurick and Benjamin A. Jones, English and Celtic in Contact (Routledge, 2008) with Markku Filppula and Juhani Klemola, and other publications in the fields of contact linguistics, sociolinguistics and English as a lingua franca. Her current projects involve multilingual workplace interaction.
Caroline Tagg is Senior Lecturer in Applied Linguistics at The Open University, UK. Her research into language and digital technologies rests on the understanding that digital communication practices are deeply embedded into individuals’ wider social, economic and political lives. She is co-editor of Message and Medium: English language practices across old and new media, 2020 (with Mel Evans), and Mobile Messaging and Resourcefulness: a post-digital ethnography, 2022 (with Agnieszka Lyons).
Irene Taipale is a doctoral researcher at the University of Eastern Finland, where she also teaches an advanced-level course on sociolinguistics. She holds two MA s (English Language and Culture; Literature) and is currently writing her dissertation on Americanization in lingua franca English within the project COMET: Weak-tie hypothesis in complex digital networks (2024–2028), funded by the Research Council of Finland. Her first article was published in Frontiers in Communication (2022). She also serves on the board of The Linguistic Association of Finland.
Difei (Lynn) Zhang earned her Ph.D. in English Language and Linguistics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is currently an Assistant Editor for American Speech, the journal of the American Dialect Society. Her research interests in English syntax and register analysis are informed by her experience teaching composition and syntax, where she worked with various grammatical constructions across diverse text types and contexts. In her recent work, she contributes to the journal’s “Among the New Words” column, documenting and collecting neologisms, while further exploring linguistic variations and changes in the digital age.