Ulrich Ammon was Professor of German Linguistics with Sociolinguistics at the University of Duisburg-Essen. He taught at universities all over the world, including: The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA; in Australia at the University of Sydney, Australian National University in Canberra; in Japan at Dokkyo University, Soka; and in Austria at Vienna University. Ammon was a member of several scientific organisations and was President of the International Association of Applied Linguistics (GAL) from 2003-2006. He was involved in many third-party projects funded by the German Research Foundation, the Volkswagen Foundation, the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the European Union and the German Academic Exchange Service. His main research interests were: sociolinguistics, language policy, international language research, variation linguistics and dialectology.