Ana Deumert is professor of Linguistics at the University of Cape Town. Her research programme falls within the broad field of sociolinguistics and has a strong transdisciplinary orientation. She has published on historical sociolinguistics and the study of mobile communication, has worked on the semiotics of music and art, the politics of language, and continues to explore the contribution that decolonial thought can make to sociolinguistic theory. She was co-editor of IMPACT - Studies in Language and Society (2002 to 2018) and is currently co-editor of Edinburgh Sociolinguistics, Cambridge Approaches to Language Contact, and the Encounters series (Multilingual Matters). She is the recipient of the Neville Alexander Award for the Promotion of Multilingualism (2014) and the Humboldt Research Fellowship (2016). She has also written regular columns for Diggit magazine.