Barbara Soukup: About and Research Interests

Barbara Soukup

I am Assistant Professor for the Sociolinguistics of German in Austria in the Department of

at the

I earned my PhD from the Department of Linguistics at

in Washington, DC, in 2008,

specializing in sociolinguistics.

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Here's a link to a list of my publications and academic papers.

My research interests comprise pretty much any topic in sociolinguistics, but in particular I have worked on and am fascinated by the study of language attitudes and ideology, sociolinguistic variation, linguistic landscaping, discourse analysis and interaction, language and culture, cognitive sociolinguistics, folk linguistics, perceptual dialectology, language policy, and endangered languages.
Some years ago, my interest in endangered languages led to a collaboration with the (sadly now defunct) Endangered Languages Programme of

My M.phil. thesis (Universität Wien, 2000) studied 'Language attitudes in the United States towards Southern American English' - an article summarizing my findings was published in

My PhD dissertation on the strategic use of Austrian dialect in interaction has been published as a book with the title Dialect use as interaction strategy: A sociolinguistic study of contextualization, speech perception, and language attitudes in Austria (Austrian Studies in English series, vol. 98, Braumüller Verlag Wien, 2009). The full text is now available online.

The renowned independent Austrian newspaper Die Presse published an article about my dissertation research - here's the pdf.

Currently, I am the PI of the project

- "Schüler*innen erforschen die (un)übersehbare Mehrsprachigkeit der Wiener Linguistic Landscape" ('High school students explore the (in)visible multilingualism of the Viennese ‚Linguistic Landscape'), which I am working on together with my co-investigator Elissa Pustka from the University of Vienna Romance Languages Department. Here's a link to our project website. The project is sponsored via the 'Sparkling Science 2.0' program administrated by the Oead - the Austrian Agency for Education and Internationalisation

and financed by the

- the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research.

Here's a link to our project website, and here's a link to our project presentation within the Sparkling Science program's website.

From 2014 to 2021, I was an Elise Richter Research Fellow, working on my project 'English in the linguistic landscape of Vienna, Austria' (EllViA), for which I received a grant from the Austrian Science Fund

(Project No. V394-G23). Here's the link to the ELLViA project's website:

I am also a member of the FWF Special Research Programme (SFB) 'German in Austria: Variation - Contact - Perception' (F60). Here's the link to that program's homepage: