Cluster Members

Cluster Positions
Faculty Members and Partners

Benjamin Bryce (Member) is an associate professor in the Department of History and chair of Latin American Studies. He has written two books about bilingualism, language maintenance, and generational differences amongst German-speaking immigrants in the Americas. His most recent book is The Boundaries of Ethnicity: German Immigration and the Language of Belonging in Ontario (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022) offers an avenue towards contributing to research on migration and bilingualism in Canada in its multicultural make-up in this project.

Amanda Cardoso (Member) is a Lecturer in the Department of Linguistics at UBC. She is a member of the Centre for Migration Studies, and the Language Sciences Institute. Dr. Cardoso is a member of the Speech in Context lab and co-supervises students in the Integrated Speech Research Lab. Much of her work is on variation and change in English varieties in Canada and the United Kingdom as well as understanding biases in relation to technology and variation in understudied languages. Her expertise is in language attitudes and social inequality, language variation and change, bias in speech-to-text, sociophonetics, and quantitative methods. She is involved in exploring variation in Canadian Englishes, especially in the western context (BC). The expertise that Dr. Cardoso brings in relation to language attitudes and her experience with outreach to non-academic audiences will be useful for engaging with the community.

John Chew (Partner) has been (founding) editor-in-chief of the new Canadian English Dictionary (CED) since early 2022, which is currently in its editorial-policy-design and proof-of-concept stages. Any outcome of this Cluster Grant would directly influence John’s work on how to make Standard Canadian English an inclusive concept. The idea is that our theoretical and practical work will directly inform the CED’s policies towards the Canadian standard.

Stefan Dollinger (Member and Principal Investigator) is professor at the Department of English Language and Literatures. On of his major research areas is Canadian English, historically and sociolinguistically. He has led the revival of the Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles (1st ed. 1967, 2nd ed. 2017, 3rd ed. 2025), the “Canadian OED”. Questions of language and identity are central in his work (Creating Canadian English: the Professor, the Mountaineer, and a National Variety of English, Cambridge UP, 2019; The Written Questionnaire in Social Dialectology, Benjamins 2016). Working in the English department and in Linguistics alike, he hopes to “EDI” Standard Canadian English in meaningful ways with a buy-in from a wide array of users. Some of this decolonizing and dehegemonizing work is inevitably difficult but necessary (The Pluricentricity Debate, Routledge 2019 or his 2025 paper in Discourse & Society, “Eberhard Kranzmayer’s dovetailing with Nazim: his fascist years and the “One Standard German Axiom” (OSGA)).

Emma Ferrett (Collaborator) (Queen’s University) is a PhD student and has been part of the Canadian English Dictionary editorial team since 2023. She is uniquely positioned as someone with training in practical lexicography in Canadian English (e.g. Ferrett & Dollinger 2020).

Alexi Fox (Partner) (Editors Canada) is a member of the Canadian English Dictionary steering committee, where she takes care of social media outreach. She will coordinate our outreach and communications effort.

Tim Frandy (Member) is an assistant professor of Indigenous Nordic Studies and the Director of Nordic Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Central, Eastern, and Northern European Studies. Trained in Indigenous studies and folklore studies, Frandy’s research focuses on traditional culture, revitalization and decolonization, public humanities, and environmental humanities. Frandy’s annotated translation, Inari Sámi Folklore: Stories from Aanaar is the first polyvocal collection of Sámi oral tradition ever published in English, and their co-edited volume Culture Work: Folklore for the Public Good was recognized by Smithsonian Magazine as one of the best academic books of 2022. Frandy will support Nordic and Finno-Ugric language inclusion in the project and will add a valuable Non-Indo-European perspective that has been shaped from various world Indigenous perspectives.

Anastasia Riehl (Member) is the director of the Strathy Language Unit at Queen’s University, a research unit founded to study standard Canadian English. Since taking on this role in 2010, she has worked to expand the notion of ‘standard’ and increase attention to variation. She also leads the community organization Endangered Language Alliance Toronto which records heritage languages spoken in the city, with an interest in how these languages help to shape Canadian English. During the grant period, she will be working to build a corpus of texts that includes a broad range of Canadian English varieties, to allow for lexicographical research that better reflects the country’s linguistic diversity. She is a team member of the Canadian English Dictionary‘s editorial team and supports its efforts actively.