Raymond Hickey is Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Duisburg and Essen, Germany. His main research interests are varieties of English (especially Irish English and Dublin English) and general questions of language contact, variation and change. Among his recent book publications are Motives for Language Change (Cambridge, 2003), Legacies of Colonial English (Cambridge, 2004), Dublin English: Evolution and Change (2005), Irish English: History and Present-day Forms (Cambridge, 2007), The Handbook of Language Contact (2010), Eighteenth-Century English (Cambridge, 2010), Areal Features of the Anglophone World (2012) and The Sound Structure of Modern Irish (2014).