Stefan is interested in the connection of language and identity, broadly construed, which he most often explores from the vantage points of sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, dialectology and lexicography. He has published monographs on Canadian English, Austrian German and other non-dominant language varieties with Routledge, Cambridge University Press, John Benjamins and new academic press in Vienna. The editor-in-chief of the third edition of A Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles (UBC, 2025; www.dchp.ca/dchp3) has been at UBC English Language and Literatures since his postdoctoral days. Before his time as Full Professor at UBC, however, he held a research chair at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, and was Canadian Studies guest professor at the University of Kiel, Germany

When teaching, Stefan focuses on the connection of theory with practice and brings an authentic research experience to the class, even in first year. Working with real language material from actual situations and speakers is key in his teaching.

Teaching areas: all areas of sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, language variation and word meaning and lexicography, structure of English

My research interests coalesce around historical linguistics, dialectology and sociolinguistics, with a focus on language and identity. With the Candaidan Word Centre (canadianwordcentre.ubc.ca), I think about standard languages, ideas that we test on Canadian English. My overall motivation is driven by the exploration of patterns in language variation and change and by the integration of historical and present-day data and approaches. I have worked on methodological questions, including the application of written questionnaires to current research questions and contexts and, recently, more on Austrian German.

Public outreach and knowledge dissemination is important to me, as I consult on linguistic issues (e.g. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, CTV Newsworld, Global TV BC, The Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, Vancouver Sun); I have given public talks and lectures on various linguistic topics (e.g. on Global Englishes, Canadian English, the history of English, dictionary making, questions of language use) and I take an avid interest in language pedagogical questions and questions of multilingualism and linguistic rights.

Select Publications

Monographs

Dollinger, Stefan, Anneliese Rieger-Roschitz & Simon Schwaighofer. 2025. Österreichisches Deutsch: eine 300-jährige Liebesgeschichte [Austrian German: A 300-Year Love Story]. Vienna: new academic press.

Dollinger, Stefan. 2021. [Austrian German or German in Austria? Identities in the 21st Century] Österreichisches Deutsch oder Deutsch in Österreich? Identitäten im 21. Jahrhundert. 3^rd ed. Vienna, Hamburg: new academic press.

Dollinger, Stefan. 2019. The Pluricentricity Debate: On Austrian German and other Germanic Standard Varieties. London: Routledge (Focus Series).

Dollinger, Stefan. 2019. Creating Canadian English: the Professor, the Mountaineer, and a National Variety of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Historical dictionaries

Dollinger, Stefan (chief editor) and Margery Fee (associate editor). 2025. DCHP-3: The Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles, Third Edition.  www.dchp.ca/dchp3. Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia.

Journal articles

Dollinger, Stefan and Lars Hinrichs. 2026. Canadian language attitudes from “coast to coast to coast”: on the pluricentricity of English. Australian Journal of Linguistics 46(2): 257-279. (70%)

Dollinger, Stefan. 2026. The open-class lexis of Canadian English: history, structure and social & regional correlations. In The New Cambridge History of the English Language, Vol. 5 ed. by Natalie Schilling-Estes, Derek Denis and Raymond Hickey, 502-532. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Chew, John, III (Society for Canadian English), Stefan Dollinger (UBC), Emma Ferrett (Queen’s University), Amir Ghorvei (Queen’s University) & Anastasia K. Riehl (Queen’s Universiy, Strathy Language Unit). 2026. A Canadian English Dictionary for All: Reviving Present-Day Lexicography in an Inclusive Era. Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America 47(1): 104-73. (20%).

Dollinger, Stefan, Matthew Clark, Paula Contreras Rosas, Jennifer Dinh, Dylan Evangelista, Dristi Gounder, Sophie J. Gunn, Kyan Ho, Alicia Matthews, Natalia Mohar, Naomi Yeung, and John J. Chew, III. 2026. On the First “Canadian Word of the Year” Competition. Canadian Literature 264: 219–236. (30%)

Dollinger, Stefan. 2025. Wittgenstein’s Dictionary: the philosopher and the linguistic autonomy of Standard Austrian German. Dictionaries 46(2): 291 – 334. (submitted 23 May 2024, accepted 20 May 2025, appeared 3 Dec 2025), 11,200 words.

Dollinger, Stefan. 2025. Eberhard Kranzmayer’s dovetailing with Nazism: His fascist years and the ‘One Standard German Axiom (OSGA)’. Discourse & Society 36(2): 147-179. https://doi.org/10.1177/09579265241259094 (19 Feb. 2024, online first published on 7 Aug. 2024)

Jones, Emilie*, Veronika Larsen** and Stefan Dollinger. 2024. Silencing Voices: Indigenous Day Schools and the Education Section of Hawthorn’s 1958 Report for British Columbia. British Journal of Canadian Studies 36(1): 3–27. * MA student, ** PhD student (accepted 9 Aug. 2023, publ. 11 March 2024)

Dollinger, Stefan. 2023. Eberhard Kranzmayer’s Deutschtum: on the Austrian dialectologist’s pan-German frame of reference. Journal of Austrian Studies 56(3): 62-89. https://www.academia.edu/79091252/

Ferrett, Emma* and Stefan Dollinger. 2020. Is digital always better? Comparing two English print dictionaries with their current digital counterparts. International Journal of Lexicography https://doi.org/10.1093/ijl/ecaa016

* MA student

Dollinger, Stefan. 2019. Debunking “pluri-areality”: on the pluricentric perspective of national varieties. Journal of Linguistic Geography 7(2): 98-112.

Dollinger, Stefan. 2017. TAKE UP #9 as a semantic isogloss on the Canada-US border. World Englishes 36(1): 80-103.

Dollinger, Stefan. 2016. Googleology as smart lexicography: big, messy data for better regional labels. Dictionaries 37: 60-98.

Book chapters 

Dollinger, Stefan. 2026. On national dictionaries: Pluricentricity in the global context and the example of Standard Canadian English. In World-wide perspectives on English usage: Into the third millennium, ed. by Adam Smith & Peter Collins, 35-58. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Dollinger, Stefan. 2026. Disciplinary moulds and epistemological clashes: the historical lexicography of Austrian German and Canadian English as rather different test cases. In Lexical Variation and Knowledge Construction across Historical, Methodological, and Cultural Ecologies, ed. by Rita Calabrese, Rossella Latorraca, Jacqueline Aiello, and Dirk Geeraerts, 220-241. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Dollinger, Stefan. 2025. Dialectology as “language making”: hegemonic disciplinary discourse and the One Standard German Axiom (OSGA). In (Dia)lects in the 21st Century: Selected Papers from Methods in Dialectology XVII (Mainz, 2022), ed. by Susanne Wagner & Ulrike Stange-Hundsdörfer, 287-318. Berlin: Language Science Press.

Dollinger, Stefan and Máté Huber. 2026. [2024 online first]. Pluricentric languages: retrospect and prospect. In International Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 3rd Edition, Vol. 1, 288-293, ed. by Hilary Nesi and Petar Milin. Amsterdam: Elsevier. https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-323-95504-1.00028-4.

Dollinger, Stefan, Vanessa Chan*, Kate Pasula* and Anthony Maag*. 2024. Attitudes towards World Englishes in Canada: are elementary school children linguistically more tolerant than adults? In Acquisition and Variation in World Englishes: Bridging Paradigms and Rethinking Approaches, ed. by Mirjam Schmalz, Manuela Vida-Mannl, Sarah Buschfeld and Thorsten Brato, 307-33. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. * BA students

Dollinger, Stefan and Alexandra Doherty*. 2023. Mah-kook, Skookum, Tillicum: Chinook Jargon loanwords in the changing discursive construction of a British Columbian settler identity. In Language Contact and the History of English Lexicon: Processes and Effects on Specific Text-Types, ed. by Gabriella Mazzon, 191-218. Berne: Lang (Austrian Studies in English 107). * recent MA graduate

Dollinger, Stefan. 2021. English Lexicography: A global perspective. In The Handbook of English Linguistics, 2^nd ed. Ed. by Bas Aarts, April McMahon, and Lars Hinrichs, 525-546. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

Dollinger, Stefan. 2020. Canadian English dictionaries: the first century (1912-2017). In The Cambridge Companion to English Dictionaries, ed. by Sarah Ogilvie, 255-264. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Dollinger, Stefan. 2020. English in Canada. In: Handbook of World Englishes, Second edition, ed. by Cecil Nelson, Zoya Proshina & Daniel Davis, 52-69. Malden, MA: Blackwell-Wiley.

Dollinger, Stefan. 2019. ‘I hope you will excuse my bad writing’: shall vs. will in the 1830s Petworth Emigration to Canada Corpus (PECC). In Keeping in Touch:
Familiar Letters across the English-speaking World, ed. by Raymond Hickey, 43-66. Amsterdam: Benjamins (Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics 10).

Dollinger, Stefan. 2019. Dictionaries and Lexicography: Research-oriented Approaches for Larger Lower-level HEL Classes. In Teaching the History of the English Language, ed. by Colette Moore and Chris Palmer, 213-24. MLA Options in Teaching Series.

Dollinger, Stefan. 2018. How old is ‘eh’? On the early history of a Canadian shibboleth. In: Wa7 xweysás i nqwal’utteníha i ucwalmícwa: He loves the people’s languages. Essays in honour of Henry Davis, ed. by Lisa Matthewson, Erin Guntly, Marianne Huijsmans and Michael Rochemont, 469-488. Vancouver, BC: UBC [UBC Occasional Papers in Linguistics, 6].

Dollinger, Stefan. 2017. Revising the Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles: World Englishes and linguistic variation in real-time. In The Routledge Handbook of Lexicography, ed. by Pedro A. Fuertes Olivera (in the section on “Innovative Online Dictionaries), 367-382. London Routledge.

Dollinger, Stefan. 2017. Canadian English in real-time perspective. In History of English. Vol. V: Varieties of English, ed. by Alexander Bergs & Laurel Brinton, 53-79. Berlin, New York: de Gruyter Mouton (De Gruyter Mouton Reader Series).

Dollinger, Stefan. 2016. On the regrettable dichotomy between philology and linguistics: historical lexicography and historical linguistics as test cases. In Studies in the History of English VII: Generalizing vs. Particularizing Methodologies in Historical Linguistic Analysis, ed. by Don Chapman, Colette Moore and Miranda Wilcox, 61-89. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.