Matthias was a PhD student in the Germanic Studies Department of the University of Texas at Austin. He joined the Department after receiving his Magister from the University of Cologne, Germany. Apart from his interest in contact linguistics he is enthralled by historical linguistics and the history of linguistics itself as well as standardization and variation in language. After graduating with his PhD from UT Austin in 2017, he started his postdoctoral position in the German Department at the University of Vienna, Austria.