Primary fields of research

• Sociolinguistic analyses of spoken and written Danish
• History of the Danish speech community 1900-2000
• History of Danish linguistics and its international background

Current research

For the moment I am working on:

• Sociolinguistic theories
• The history of linguistics, in particular the history of structuralism in Denmark
• Language in the great cities of Europe, from a historical perspective
• The relationship between Danish and Swedish in the Øresund region (DASVA)

Impact

At the Faculty of Humanities my research is used as an example of the impact the humanities researchers have on society.
Read the case: Spoken language is a dynamic entity.

CV

• MA in Linguistics 1973 with a minor in the psychology of language 1978
• Ph.D. scholarship for a major collaborative project on school language at the Institute of Applied and Mathematical Linguistics 1974-78
• Affiliated with the Department of Nordic Philology since 1979, first as an assistant (adjunkt) and a year later as an associate professor (lektor)
• From 1989 till 1996 associate professor at the Department of Danish dialectology
• From 1996 until 2018 full professor of Danish language at the then Department of Nordic Philology, now the Department of Scandinavian Studies and Linguistics
• From the 1st of May 2005 until 30th of September 2015 in addition director of the Danish National Research Foundation Centre of Language Change in Real Time (the LANCHART centre), a joint project of the Department of Scandinavian Studies and Linguistics and the Department of Scandinavian Research (INSS and NFI)
• Together with Peter Harder, Birgit Henriksen and Dorte Albrechtsen I started the Copenhagen University Centre for Internationalisation and Parallel Language Use (CIP) and I was a member of the Members' Board for the research infra structure LARM 2010-2013
• Representing the Humanities in the UCPH Tenure Track Committee 2014-, and from 2015 and until 20218 chairman
• Member of the steering group for the Centre for Advanced Migration Studies and the MA i Advanced Migration Studies (AMIS), UCPH from the start until 2016.
• Coordinator for a Nordic network on parallel language use at universities 2011-2013 and convenor of the Nordic group on the same subject under the auspices of the Nordic Council of Ministers 2014-2017
• Director of the Research Project Danish Voices in the Americas, financed by the A.P.Møller Foundation and the Carlsberg Foundation plus the UCPH, 2014-2018.
• Member of the committee to prepare the meetings of the Academic council of the Humanities at the UCPH 2016-2018
• Chair of the advisory board for the project INFRASTRUCTURALISM, financed by the Carlsberg Foundation 2019-2022
• Chairman of the steering board for the project NORDUNG, a project on Nordic perspective in secondary education financed by the A P Møller Foundation 2023-2026
• Promoted to philosophiæ doctor honoris causa at the University of Uppsala 26th of January 2024

Knowledge of languages

• Productive competence: Danish, English and Swedish (with a Danish accent), bad German and French and even worse Italian and Spanish; I write in Danish and English
• Receptive competence: I read English, Swedish, Norwegian (both norms), German and French, I understand most of what is said in these languages, too, and to a certain extent even utterances in French and Italian and slightly less so in Spanish 

Short presentation

External duties:

• Member of the editorial board for Acta Linguistica Hafniensia
• Member of the editorial board for the journal Language in Society 2014-2020
• Member of the editorial Board of NoSo, Nordic journal for Socioonomastics 2020-2024