Ellen Jones got her PhD from the Germanic Studies at UT Austin in 2025. She joined the project in January 2020 as an additional Graduate Research Assistant. Coming to Austin from Vermont, she completed her undergraduate studies in Linguistics and German at the University of Vermont, and was the Outstanding German Senior in 2019. Her research interests include sociolinguistics, dialectology, language teaching pedagogy, and language use in media. She spent a gap year living in Rhauderfehn, Germany through the American Field Service exchange program. While unfamiliar with Texas German, Ellen’s interest in dialects stems from her time in Rhauderfehn living with a family who partially speaks Low German at home.