General Introduction

Gary D. (Manchec) German is a dual French and American national. Born in Paris, he was raised in a multilingual household with family roots in Finistère, Lancashire, North Wales, and the United States (Massachusetts and Virginia). He holds two PhDs (in Breton dialectology and in the sociolinguistics/linguistics of Welsh English) and an Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches (English sociolinguistics). He is Emeritus Professor of English at the Université de Bretagne Occidentale, Brest, where he taught English phonology and grammar, historical linguistics, and sociolinguistics from 1999 to 2018. He has been a member of the Centre de Recherche Bretonne et Celtique (UBO) for over forty-five years. In this capacity, he taught Breton historical phonology, Breton dialectology and Middle Welsh literature. Previously, he taught English language and linguistics at the Universities of Nantes, Poitiers as well as French and English at George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia.