David Britain has been Professor of Modern English Linguistics at the University of Bern since 2010. His research interests embrace language variation and change, varieties of English (especially in East Anglia and Southern England, the Southern Hemisphere, especially New Zealand, Australia and the Falkland Islands and the Pacific, especially Micronesia), dialect contact and attrition, new dialect formation, second dialect acquisition, dialect ideologies and the use of new technologies, such as smartphone applications, in collecting dialect data. He is also actively engaged in research at the dialectology-human geography interface, especially with respect to space/place, urban/rural (especially language ideologies about, and media representations of the rural, and how these reinforce stereotypes about rural dialects) and the role of mobilities (especially with respect to dialect transmission, dialect diffusion, new dialect formation, dialect levelling and attrition, and dialectological fieldwork).