I am a sociolinguist and dialectologist by training.  I have since researched the development of Midlands Englishes and the way in which they changed during the Industrial Revolution, which caused the mass movement of so many people. I am a Senior Lecturer in English Language and Linguistics and came to Wolverhamton in 2020, having worked at Universities across the West Midlands beforehand. 

I am highly familiar with the dialect landscape of the West Midlands and enjoy also reading dialect literature from the region. 

I can speak German and am continuing to learn Irish and Welsh. 

My current research is centred on dialect attrition in the Black Country, and the second strand of my work seeks to document the neighbouring dialect of Shropshire. In addition to this I continue to work with colleagues on the role of women in mining across the Midlands post Industrial Revolution.

Ordinary Member, British Association for Applied Linguistics.

Ordinary Member, Linguistics Association of Great Britain.

MA : English Language and German, University of Edinburgh.

MA in English Language and World Englishes, University of Leeds.

PhD, 'Black Country English and Black Country Identity', University of Leeds.

Postgraduate Certificate in Professional Practice, Aston University.

Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Asprey, Esther, 2025. West Midlands English. In: (ed) Kingsley Bolton, The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of World Englishes. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. DOI: 10.1002/9781119518297

Asprey, Esther, 2022. Verbal negation strategies in the Black Country-spatial and temporal variation. Dialectologia, 28, pp. 57-80

Asprey, Esther 2021. The language of the senses in the dialect of the Black Country. In (eds) Groes, Sebastian and Robert Francis, Smell, Memory and Literature in the Black Country. London: Palgrave Macmillan., 85-107.

Asprey, Esther, Jeffries, Ella and Kailoglou, Eleftherios, 2021. First approaches to an underexplored dialect region: Trudgill’s Upper Southwest. Dialectologia et Geolinguistica 29 (1), 137-159

Asprey, Esther 2020. ‘Black Country dialect literature and what it can tell us about Black Country dialect.’ In (eds) Honeybone, Patrick & Warren Maguire, Dialect Writing and the North of England. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 27-45.

Asprey, Esther and Caroline Tagg, 2019.The pragmatic use of vocatives in private one-to-one digital communication. Internet Pragmatics 2:1, 83-111.

Lawson, Robert and Esther Asprey, 2018. English and social identity. In (eds) Philip Seargeant, Ann Hewings & Stephen Pihlaja , Routledge handbook of English language studies, London: Routledge.

2017. Tagg, Caroline and Esther Asprey ‘Messaging in the Midlands: Exploring digital literacy repertoires in a superdiverse region.’ In: IRiS Working Papers 16. Available at: http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/Documents/college-social-sciences/social-policy/iris/2017/IRiS-WP-16-2017.pdf

Asprey, Esther, 2015. The West Midlands’. In: (ed), Hickey, Ray, Researching Northern Englishes. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 393-416.

with Dr Urszula Clark 2013. West Midlands English: Birmingham and the Black Country. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Asprey, Esther, 2011., ‘Black Country English and Black Country Identity.’ In (eds) Seargeant, Phillip and Joan  Swann, Worlds of English: History and diversity. London: Longman; Open University Press.

Asprey. Esther, 2008, ‘The sociolinguistic stratification of a connected speech process - The case of the T to R rule in the Black Country .’ Leeds Working Papers in Linguistics and Phonetics 13. Available at: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/arts/info/125154/leeds_working_papers_in_linguistics_and_phonetics/1951/volume_13_2008.

Asprey, Esther, 2007, ‘Investigating residual rhoticity in a non-rhotic accent: the case of Birmingham and the Black Country.’ Leeds Working Papers in Linguistics and Phonetics 12. Available at: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/arts/info/125154/leeds_working_papers_in_linguistics_and_phonetics/1950/volume_12_2007.

I have worked with Walsall Archives and the Museum of the Gorge at Ironbridge in digitising their oral history collections and working on showcasing more of the content of these for public consumption. 

I am External Examiner for the University of Gloucestershire on their BA English Language programme based at the University of Economics and Finance in Ho Chi Minh City. 

I am adviser for an external doctoral candidate at the University of Edinburgh and am supervising 2 doctoral students here at Wolverhampton at present.

I am happy to supervise work on language variation and change, as well as language ideologies, and in particular the interaction between standard speakers of a language and varieties judged to be non-standard.