About the author

David Hornsby studied Modern Languages at Oriel College, Oxford, and worked briefly as a freelance translator for the United Nations in Geneva, before embarking on a PhD in Linguistics at Cambridge, which he completed in 1996. He is currently Senior Lecturer in French at the University of Kent, where he has taught since 1990, becoming in 2009 the first head of the English Language and Linguistics department, which he co-founded.

Having been curious about language variation since early childhood, he chose to specialize in sociolinguistics and has worked primarily on dialect contact and change in France and the UK. His monograph Redefining Regional French: Koinéization and Regional Dialect Levelling in Northern France (Legenda, 2006) explores the emergence of new French varieties in urban areas, a theme developed further in Language and Social Structure in Urban France (Legenda, 2013), which he co-edited with Mari Jones.