Barbara Loester

• Sociolinguistics
• Language and identity
• Minority languages
• Language policies and planning
• HipHop language

Supervision of research students

Dr Loester welcomes enquiries about research supervision in the following areas:

• Language attitudes and identity construction
• Minority and contested languages
• Language policy and planning
• Social and regional language variation in the British Isles and the German-speaking world 

Research students

Melissa Towler: Teaching Arabic as a Foreign Language at HEIs in England (2015-)

Dr Barbara Loester has a background in English, German and comparative linguistics. She took up her post at the University of Winchester in January 2009. In her PhD thesis (University of Aberdeen) she investigated the role regional varieties play in the identity construction of their speakers. Her research lies mainly in the field of sociolinguistics with a particular focus on minority and regional languages.

Barbara is the Convenor of the Centre for Research into Language, one of the University's interdisciplinary research centres.

• Social and regional language variation in the British Isles and the German-speaking world
• Language attitudes and identity construction
• Minority languages – language policies and language planning

Memberships and professional activities

• Member of ASLS
• Member of the Cultural Borders of Europe Network (CBE)
• Member of the International Advisory Board of the Centre for European Research at Gothenburg University (CERGU), Sweden
• Reviewer for Cambridge University Press, Hodder Education, Russian Journal of Linguistics, and Moderna Språk

Book chapters

• "Scotland and Bavaria: regional affililation and linguistic identity in 'peripheral' communities. In: Ciepiela, K. (ed.) (2011) Identity Through a Language Lens. Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang; pp. 63-72.
• "The pluricentric borders of Bavaria." In: Andrén, M.; Lindkvist, T.; Söhrmann, I. and Vajta, K. (eds) (2017) Cultural Borders of Europe: Narratives, Concepts and Practices in the Present and the Past. New York/Oxford: Berghahn; pp. 85-99.

Peer-reviewed journal articles

• "A comparison of the language situations of Bavarian and Scots." Scottish Language (2009) 28: 89-102.
• "'A significant part of an insignificant identity': the re-articulation of North-East Scots between tradition and globalization.' Russian Journal of Linguistics (2017) 21(2): 335-347. 

Conference proceedings (peer-reviewed)

• "A sociolinguistic perspective on identity and language attitudes in two minority communities." Proceedings of the International Conference on Minority and Majority: Language, Culture and Identity. Unimas Kuching, Malaysia. (in press)