Benedikt Szmrecsanyi holds MA and PhD degrees in English linguistics from the University of Freiburg. He is currently a Fellow with the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, where he directs the project 'Geolinguistic and Genetic Patterns of Grammatical Variation in Varieties of English'. His research interests include variationist linguistics, dialectology and dialectometry, varieties of English world-wide, historical linguistics (in particular, syntactic change) and the interface between variation studies and language typology. Viewing linguistic variation as a window into the hidden structure of human language and the nature of linguistic knowledge, he has to date published some ten papers in international, peer-reviewed journals (including English Language and Linguistics, Language Variation and Change, and Lingua) and is the author of the monograph Morphosyntactic Persistence in Spoken English (2006). He is the co-editor of several volumes, including Linguistic Complexity: Second Language Acquisition, Indigenization, Contact (2012). Benedikt Szmrecsanyi is one of the compilers of the Freiburg Corpus of English Dialects, a major naturalistic speech corpus that samples traditional dialect speech all over Great Britain.