Adrian Leemann

Adrian Leemann is Professor of German Sociolinguistics at the University of Bern. Research on dialect variation and change in Swiss German, German and English.
University of Bern

Adrian Leemann

I am a full professor of German sociolinguistics at the University of Bern. I study how and why the way people speak varies and changes across regions, generations and social groups, in Swiss German, German and English, using large-scale data from fieldwork, smartphone apps and perception experiments.

Adrian Leemann sitting on a wooden bench in front of a concrete wall

Projects All projects

Map of England and Wales with major cities

SNSF and AHRC · from 2026

CURLEW: a new census of English dialects

The first major survey of dialects in England and Wales in more than 75 years, modeled on the Swiss Dialäktatlas: speakers of all ages and backgrounds, urban and rural, recorded to show how people speak today.

With Dave Britain, Paul Foulkes and David Willis · CHF 2.5 million

Map of Switzerland with the German-speaking area in black

Dialäktatlas

How Swiss German has changed since the 1950s, in more than 500 maps.

SNSF Eccellenza · 2025 · open access

Map of Germany, Austria and German-speaking Switzerland

Sound Effects

Where the social meaning of speech sounds comes from, tested in Switzerland, Germany and Austria.

SNSF · with Erez Levon

Map of German-speaking Switzerland with six school locations

LIFT

The Dialäktatlas goes to school: a research week for secondary school students.

SNSF Agora · 2026 to 2028

News

  • Sep 2025Dave Britain, Paul Foulkes, David Willis and I have been awarded CHF 2.5 million by the SNSF and AHRC for CURLEW, the first major survey of English dialects in England and Wales in more than 75 years. Starts 2026.
  • VideoNew video on Bernese dialects and sociolects: three locals talk about their everyday language. Watch on YouTube
  • BookAn Introduction to Forensic Phonetics and Forensic Linguistics is out with Routledge, with Ria Perkins, Grace Sullivan Buker and Paul Foulkes.

Events

  • Oct 2026NWAV, Montreal
  • Oct 2026Invited talk, University of Basel
  • 22 Oct 2026Invited talk, Departement Volkswirtschaft und Inneres, Canton of Aargau, Justizvollzugsanstalt Lenzburg

Selected publications All publications

2025
Leemann, A., C. Steiner, M. Studerus, L. Oberholzer, P. Jeszenszky, F. Tomaschek, S. Kistler (2025). Dialäktatlas – 1950 bis heute. vdf Hochschulverlag.
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2020
Leemann, A., Jeszenszky, P., Steiner, C., Studerus, M., Messerli, J. (2020). Linguistic fieldwork in a pandemic: Supervised data collection combining smartphone recordings and videoconferencing. Linguistics Vanguard, 6.3.
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2018
Leemann, A., M.-J. Kolly, D. Britain (2018). The English Dialects App: the creation of a crowdsourced dialect corpus. Ampersand 5, 1-17.
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2016
Leemann, A., M.-J. Kolly, R. Purves, D. Britain, E. Glaser (2016). Crowdsourcing language change with smartphone applications. PLOS ONE.
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2014
Leemann, A., Kolly, M.-J., Dellwo, V. (2014). Speaker-individuality in suprasegmental temporal features: implications for forensic voice comparison. Forensic Science International 238, 59-67.
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