I'm Professor and Personal Chair of Sociolinguistics, in Linguistics and English Language, in the School of Philosophy, Psychology, and Language Sciences,  at the University of Edinburgh.

​As a sociophonetician, I study the social aspects of phonetic variation. My research focuses on differences in speech among speakers of different social backgrounds and in different social contexts. I'm interested in the factors that affect how speech changes over time. I'm also interested in variation as a social signal and the impact of accent on speakers' credibility and economic success.
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Since the Covid-19 pandemic hit, I have been the founder and director of the Lothian Diary Project.