My research interests are contact linguistics, urban multilingualism, language typology, dialectology, language documentation, language policy and forensic linguistics (in particular language analysis for the determination of origin). My main language specialisms are Romani, languages of the Middle East (in particular Kurdish, Arabic, Domari and Turkish) and German dialects, as well as so-called ‘Sonderprachen’ (special languages or in-group vocabularies of peripatetic populations).

I have led large-scale research projects on the dialects of Romani, Kurdish, and Arabic and on Mixed Languages, linguistic areas, and urban multilingualism, with grants from a variety of UK-based and European research councils and foundations. I was Professor of Linguistics at the University of Manchester until 2020, and have held honorary and guest positions at the universities of Sorbonne, Cambridge, La Trobe, Berlin-Humboldt, Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics, Hanse Institute for Advanced Studies, and others. In 2017 I was awarded a British Academy Wolfson Professorial Fellowship to study policy and practice around urban multilingualism. I studied General Linguistics and Arabic at the Hebrew University, and Comparative and German Linguistics at the universities of Tübingen and Hamburg, completing my MA thesis on Kurdish and my PhD on a pragmatic-functional and typological analysis of Romani.