Research Companion to Language and Country Branding (PDF)

Irene Theodoropoulou is Associate Professor of Sociolinguistics at Qatar University. Her current research interests lie at the intersection of Modern Greek and Arabic sociolinguistics, intercultural communication and discourse analysis with politics, architecture, communication studies and sports. Her geographical areas of interest include primarily Greece and the State of Qatar. She is the author of Sociolinguistics of Style and Social Class in Contemporary Athens (2014), and her most recent publications include journal articles in Language Policy, Sociolinguistic Studies, Lingua, Journal of Arabian Studies, Discourse & Society and Visual Communication. Currently, she is the Lead PI of an Impact Grant, funded by Qatar University, on sports-related branding.

Johanna Tovar, née Woydack, is Assistant Professor at WU (Vienna University of Economics and Business) in the Department of Foreign Language Business Communication. Prior to moving to Austria, she was a postdoctoral fellow at City University Hong Kong. She received her PhD in Sociolinguistics from King's College London and holds a master's degree in Anthropology from the London School of Economics. She has done ethnographic fieldwork in a variety of organizations and workplaces, including call centers in Europe and Asia, pertaining to issues such as standardization, text trajectories, invisible work, resistance and compliance, monitoring, and migration. Her monograph Linguistic Ethnography of a Multilingual Call Center was published in 2019. Her most recent publications have appeared in journals such as Language in Society, the International Journal of Business Communication, English for Specific Purposes, and Sociolinguistic Studies.