Giuliana Regnoli, Thorsten Brato

Giuliana Regnoli, Ph.D. University of Naples “L’Orientale” and University of Heidelberg, is a research fellow (RtdA) in English Linguistics at the University of Pisa and a post-doc researcher (Habilitandin) at the University of Regensburg. Her research interests include sociophonetics, language attitudes, perceptual dialectology and World Englishes. Her monograph Accent variation in Indian varieties of English: A folk linguistic study (Frankfurt: Peter Lang) investigates language attitudes, ethnic identities and metalinguistic awareness in Indian diasporic speech communities. She is currently working on children’s English in Cameroon.

Thorsten Brato is stand-in chair of English Linguistics at the University of Bayreuth. Having earned his PhD on dialect contact and youth language in Aberdeen, he has since worked extensively on African Englishes. He compiled the Historical Corpus of English in Ghana (HiCE Ghana) and explored the historical evolution of English in the country and carried out morphological, syntactic and semantic analyses. He is also interested in sociophonetic variation in African Englishes and has recently co-edited a volume on language acquisition and language variation in children in World Englishes.