Nils Langer has been Professor of North Frisian and Minority Studies at the Europa-Universität Flensburg since 2016. Born and raised in Neumünster (Germany) in 1969, he studied German  and English Linguistics at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne (1991-2000) where he graduated with a PhD in the historical sociolinguistics of German in 2000. From 2000-2016, he was a lecturer in German, later Professor of Germanic Linguistics at the University of Bristol. He has held fellowships from the Herzog-August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel, the Smithsonian Foundation (Washington, DC), and the Alexander-von-Humboldt-Foundation (Bonn). His research focuses on the question as to why people get upset about the way other people speak, a topic which is central to anyone working on minority and minoritized languages. In his work he has focused on Germanic languages, in particular North Frisian, Low German and High German, using data from the present day and historical stages.