About me

I am from Hungary where I grew up in the outskirts of Budapest in a bilingual, Hungarian-German-speaking village. I learned Russian in school and studied abroad in Russia. I also worked in Austria and Germany during the summers to learn literary German. In the fall of 1989, I saw the Berlin Wall come down as a Fellow of the European Union Center of the University of Nancy II in Nancy, France, and decided to stay in France for doctoral studies.

My PhD is from the University of Paris III, Sorbonne Nouvelle. I trained under the joint supervision of two advisors and worked in two outstanding research groups: one at ILPGA at Paris III (with Jacqueline Vaissière and Mary-Annick Morel) and one at the Research Institute in Linguistics in Budapest (with Ilona Kassai and Miklós Kontra). After my PhD defense, I spent two years at Drexel University in Philadelphia where I taught French and the University of Pennsylvania where I worked in Bill Labov’s sociolinguistics lab. I have been living in Illinois with my trilingual French-Hungarian-American family since 1999.

I went through the ranks at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and was promoted to Full Professor in 2023. I served as the Head of the Department of French & Italian from Fall 2020 to Spring 2025. This is our main page (FRIT in Illinois): check us out!

My main areas of research combine the study of sounds (phonetics and phonology) and language in society (sociolinguistics). I worked on French spoken in multiethnic urban settings, conducted research in laboratory settings, and directed corpus-based studies of language variation and change in French. In recent years, I extended my research and teaching to minority and standard language planning and policies in Europe, and have been collaborating with fellow sociolinguists, engineers, and computer scientists on the spread of innovations and discourses of self-identifications of race, ethnicity, and national origins for over fifteen years. Check out my UIUC web page for the latest projects.

I teach classes on the many different topics, including varieties of French, minority languages in Europe, and more recently French in US Minority Cultures (the link to this course, offered in Spring 2026).