Geolingual Studies

Welcome!

We are a transdisciplinary team whose joint focus is to advance the investigation of urban spaces by examining their linguistic dynamics.

Geolingual Studies is an innovative area of research and teaching which takes a decisively applied linguistic approach and combines methodologies from linguistics, geography, digital humanities and natural language processing.

As researchers from the Department of English linguistics, we collaborate with a team of researchers from the Earth Observation Research Hub and the German Aerospace Center, who specialise in satellite remote sensing. We aim to assess the interrelationship between physical and socio-cultural space from a new perspective.

For this, the description of the physical environment is complemented by the linguistic assessment of social networks, identity constructions, discourses and the perception of space in a global and culture-specific context. We seek to bring together researchers from different fields and establish theories and methodologies that lend themselves to comparative analyses of language and space.

Click here for further information on our work and ways to collaborate with us.

GLS at IAWE26

Geolingual Studies were represented with two talks at this year’s conference of the International Association for World Englishes (IAWE26) which took place in Gießen (Germany) on 25-27 July 2025 and was themed “World Englishes through Space and Time”. Read more here.

Guest Talk: "Kuwaitscapes : Mapping and games as tools for communicating urban research"

The talk will take place on July 2nd at 16:15 hrs in Room 00.002 of the Center for Philology and Digitality (ZPD) of our university. Read more here.

Super Test Site Würzburg

As a result of the GLS workshop in September 2023, a collaboration campaign has developed between researchers from different disciplines who are all interested in the interrelationship of physical and social space and the impact on people. The idea is to coordinate different research strands on the same site and in the same timeframe. Read more here.

Master thesis: A Linguistic Analysis of Emotional Responses in Tweets About the Grenfell Tower Fire Using Methods of the Digital Humanities”

The master's thesis “From ‘Oh nooooo!!! This is tragic!!!’ to ‘Extra super proud to be a Londoner today’ - A Linguistic Analysis of Emotional Responses in Tweets About the Grenfell Tower Fire Using Methods of the Digital Humanities” by Corinna Keupp was defended on the 5th of February 2025. Read more here.

Bachelor thesis: An analysis of the TikTok comment section regarding the attitudes of the community towards the overturn of Roe v. Wade in June 2022

On February 3, 2025, Anna Hercher successfully defended her Geolingual Studies focused bachelor’s thesis, “‘My body, my choice’ or ‘Your state, your decision’: An analysis of the TikTok comment section regarding the attitudes of the community towards the overturn of Roe v. Wade in June 2022”, at Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg. Supervised by Prof. Dr. Biewer, her presentation sparked an engaging discussion on ideological polarization in digital discourse. Read more here.

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Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy (MPI-SP) in Bochum

On Friday, 21 November, Dr. Richard Lemoine-Rodríguez and M.Sc. Johannes Mast visited the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy (MPI-SP) in Bochum at the invitation of its director, Prof. Meeyoung Cha. During the visit, they represented our Geolingual Studies team. Read more here.

GLS at isLE8

At this year’s Conference of the International Society for the Linguistics of English (isLE8), which took place in Santiago de Compostela from 1-4 September 2025, Lisa Lehnen and Ninja Schulz (also representing Carolin Biewer) participated in a pre-conference workshop dedicated to Expanding Circle Englishes. Read more here.

GLS at ICAME conference

On 20 June 2025, Ninja Schulz and Lisa Lehnen gave a talk on “Integrating corpus linguistics and NLP methods to explore social media discourse from Edinburgh and London” at this year’s ICAME conference in Vilnius (Lithuania). Read more here.

Presentation: Digital Traces of Urban Heat: Social Media, Temperature, and Urban Morphology

On 5 May 2025, Richard Lemoine-Rodríguez from our Geolingual Studies team presented a compelling study titled "Digital Traces of Urban Heat: Social Media, Temperature, and Urban Morphology", at the Joint Urban Remote Sensing Event (JURSE) in Tunis, Tunisia. Read more here.

Visit to London School of Economics in London

Prof Carolin Biewer and Prof Hannes Taubenböck visited the ‘Department Cities’ at the London School of Economics (LSE) (https://www.lse.ac.uk/cities) in London this week. Read more here.

Workshop on “Geodata, (social) media data and linguistics”

On 26 February 2025, a workshop on “Geodata, (social) media data and linguistics” was held at DLR in Oberpfaffenhofen. Colleagues from the German Remote Sensing Data Center (DFD) of the DLR and from the Chair of English Linguistics as well as our Earth Observation Research Cluster (EORC) of the University of Würzburg (JMU) presented the status quo of their work and discussed new research directions and opportunities for cooperation. Read more here.