Raymond Hickey is Adjunct Professor at the University of Limerick and former Professor of General Linguistics at the University of Duisburg-Essen. His research centres around varieties of English, especially Irish English, eighteenth-century English, and issues of standardization of English, language contact, and areal linguistics, as well as sociolinguistic variation and change. Among his recent book publications are The Cambridge Handbook of Areal Linguistics (CUP, 2017), English in Multilingual South Africa (CUP, 2020), and The Handbook of Language Contact (Wiley-Blackwell, 2020).