Peter Sundkvist Professor

Peter Sundkvist received his Ph.D. in English Linguistics from Stockholm University (2004), with a thesis on the phonology of Shetland English. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Linguistics, Yale University, 2005–2007. His research interests concern phonology, phonetics, and dialectology, relating to varieties of English and Germanic languages more generally. He has conducted extensive linguistic fieldwork in the Shetland Islands. His earliest research focused on the local form of Scottish Standard English as spoken in Lerwick, Shetland’s urban centre. Subsequently he was the Principal Investigator of a project on the phonology of Shetland Scots, funded by The Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation (RJ), for which he completed a regional phonological survey of the Shetland archipelago 2010–2012. More recently he has conducted empirical research on English as spoken in various parts of Asia including China and Vietnam, and has published on accent stereotypes and pulmonic ingressive speech. He is the author of the monograph The Shetland Dialect (2021, Routledge), and co-author of the third and fourth editions of the textbook World Englishes (2019, 2026, Routledge). Professor Sundkvist is also a contributor to The Handbook of Asian Englishes (2020, Wiley-Blackwell), The New Cambridge History of the English Language (2026, CUP), and The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of World Englishes (2025), for which he is the Associate Editor responsible for phonetics and phonology entries.