Projects

Research projects led by Adrian Leemann: CURLEW, Dialäktatlas, Sound Effects and LIFT.

Research

Projects

Four projects I currently lead or co-lead. Earlier projects are listed under Grants.

SNSF and AHRC · from 2026

CURLEW: Census of Urban and Rural Language in England and Wales

The first major survey of English dialects in England and Wales in more than 75 years.

England and Wales in black.

The Survey of English Dialects recorded how people spoke in the 1950s and 1960s. CURLEW is its successor: following the model of the Swiss Dialäktatlas, we record speakers of all ages and backgrounds, urban and rural, to show how English is spoken across England and Wales today, which changes are under way, and what drives them.

Groundwork: the English Dialects App

2025
Britain, D., T. Blaxter & A. Leemann (2025). A socio-geographical investigation of lexical variability in England: Evidence from the English Dialects App. In R. Sandow & N. Braber (eds.), Sociolinguistic approaches to lexical variation in English. London: Routledge.
PDF
2021
Britain, D., T. Blaxter, A. Leemann (2021). Dialect levelling in England: Evidence from the English Dialects App. In: Thibault, A., M. Avanzi, A. Millour (eds.). Nouveaux regards sur la variation dialectale / New Ways of Analyzing Dialectal Variation. TRALIPHI, 1-30.
PDF
2020
Britain, D., Blaxter, T., Leemann, A. (2020). East Anglian English in the English Dialects App. English Today, 143, Vol. 36, No. 3, 14-30.
PDF
2020
Jansen, S., Robinson, J. A., Cahill, L., Leemann, A., Blaxter, T., Britain, D. (2020). Sussex by the sea: A descriptive analysis of dialect variation in the south of England based on English Dialect App data. English Today, 143, Vol. 36, No. 3, 31-39.
PDF
2019
Strycharczuk, P., G. Brown, A. Leemann, D. Britain (2019). Investigating FOOT-STRUT in Northern Englishes using crowdsourced data. Proceedings of the ICPhS 2019, 1337-1341.
PDF
2019
Leemann, A., T. Blaxter, D. Britain, K. Earnshaw (2019). The FACE of Change in English Dialects: 1950 v 2018. Proceedings of ICPhS, 373-377.
PDF
2018
Leemann, A., M.-J. Kolly, D. Britain (2018). The English Dialects App: the creation of a crowdsourced dialect corpus. Ampersand 5, 1-17.
PDF

Funded by

Funding
SNSF and Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), CHF 2.5 million
Start
2026
Investigators
Dave Britain (Bern)
Paul Foulkes (York)
Adrian Leemann (Bern)
David Willis (Oxford)

SNSF Eccellenza · atlas published 2025

Dialäktatlas: Swiss German from 1950 to today

Do people in German-speaking Switzerland still speak like their grandparents?

German-speaking area in black; the four places mark the extremes of the survey area. Swiss language regions: Federal Statistical Office (BFS), ThemaKart 2024.

Seventy years after the Sprachatlas der deutschen Schweiz, we went back: with fieldwork, smartphone apps and video calls, we recorded more than 1,000 people, from Basel to Bosco/Gurin and from Salgesch to Diepoldsau. The atlas shows 166 features in over 500 maps and is free to download (PDF, CC BY-NC-ND).

Selected publications

2026
Leemann, A., S. Kistler, F. Tomaschek (2026). Beyond sociodemographics: attitudinal and personality predictors of lexical change. Languages 2026, 11(3), 61.
PDF
2024
Leemann, A., C. Steiner, P. Jeszenszky, J. Culpeper, L. Josi (2024). Saying goodbye to and thanking bus drivers in German-speaking Switzerland. Journal of Pragmatics, 234, 78-98.
PDF
2024
Jeszenszky, P., Steiner, C., Leemann, A. (2024). Effects of mobility on dialect change: Introducing the Linguistic Mobility Index. PLOS ONE.
PDF
2024
Jeszenszky, P., C. Steiner, N. Von Allmen, A. Leemann (2024). What drives non-linguists’ hands (or mouse) when drawing mental dialect maps? Digital Scholarship in the Humanities.
PDF
2023
Leemann, A., C. Steiner, B. Siebenhaar, P. Jeszenszky (2023). Sociolinguistic factors predicting sound change in Swiss German. Proceedings of ICPhS 2023, pp. 3030-3034.
PDF
2023
Steiner, C., P. Jeszenszky, A. Leemann (2023). From pasta zu pHizza. Variation and change in VOT in Swiss German. Proceedings of ICPhS 2023, pp. 3015-3019.
PDF
2023
Vonlanthen, S., C. Steiner, P. Jeszenszky, A. Leemann (2023). The sociolinguistics of R-vocalization in spoken Swiss Standard German. Proceedings of ICPhS, pp. 3592-3596.
PDF
2023
Steiner, C., D. Studer, C. Lanthemann, A. Büchler, A. Leemann (2023). Sociodemographic and attitudinal effects on dialect speakers’ articulation of the standard language: Evidence from German-speaking Switzerland. Proceedings of Interspeech 2023, pp. 3542-3546.
PDF
2021
Jeszenszky, P., Steiner, C., Leemann, A. (2021). Reduction of survey sites in dialectology: A new methodology based on clustering. Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence.
PDF
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.
PDF

Funded by

Funding
SNSF Eccellenza Professorial Fellowship, CHF 1.62 million
Atlas
Leemann, Steiner, Studerus, Oberholzer, Jeszenszky, Tomaschek & Kistler (2025). Dialäktatlas – 1950 bis heute. vdf Hochschulverlag.

SNSF · with Erez Levon

Sound Effects: tracing the origins of social meaning in phonetic variation

German does not sound the same everywhere, and it is not judged the same way everywhere either.

German-speaking areas in black. Swiss language regions: Federal Statistical Office (BFS), ThemaKart 2024.

Perception experiments in Switzerland, Germany and Austria, combining sociolinguistics and social psychology, show which regional features of pronunciation carry social meaning and where it comes from. This tells us which features communities are likely to keep, change or abandon.

Selected publications

2024
Pistor, T. & A. Leemann (2024). Echoes of Implicit Bias. Exploring Aesthetics and Social Meanings of Swiss German Dialect Features. Proceedings Interspeech 2024, pp. 447-451.
PDF

Funded by

Funding
SNSF, CHF 1,048,704. Grant title: Sequels of Sounds. Towards a Modeling of Sociolinguistic Sound Aesthetics
Awarded
2024
Co-PIs
Adrian Leemann
Erez Levon
Team
Tillmann Pistor (postdoc)
Elijah King (PhD)
Gina Schaffer (PhD)
Liliane Schenk (research assistant)

SNSF Agora · 2026 to 2028

LIFT: Linguistic Inquiry for Future Thinkers

The Dialäktatlas goes to school.

Pilot school in red; German-speaking area in gray. Swiss language regions: Federal Statistical Office (BFS), ThemaKart 2024.

LIFT turns the Dialäktatlas into a week-long school project: guided by short videos, secondary school students formulate a research question, collect and analyze their own data, and present their findings. Piloted in Bern, then in Zurich, Basel, Lucerne, Brig and Chur; all materials openly licensed.

Funded by

Funding
SNSF Agora, CHF 199,502
Duration
24 months, from 2026
Team
Adrian Leemann (PI)
Simon Kistler (operative lead)
Markus Beutler (Gymnasium Kirchenfeld)
Matthias Dömötör (documentary filmmaker)