Jonathan Kasstan is a Senior Lecturer in French and Linguistics at the University of Westminster, and Associate Editor at the Journal of Sociolinguistics. He comes from a position of linguistic privilege, having been raised as an English/French bilingual, and does not himself belong to a threatened language community. He has, however, dedicated his career to working with such communities using quantitative and qualitative approaches to structured variation and language change, and community-based research methods. A substantive body of his work to date has focused on Francoprovençal speaking communities in Europe, and more recently on forcibly displaced Chagossian Creole speaking communities in the UK and the Indian Ocean. The ties fostered by his work with these communities have enabled him to bring in an outsider’s perspective to critical issues for them. He is currently involved in several ongoing, externally funded research projects, including: Towards safeguarding Chagossian Creole: Understanding how language attitudes and ideologies shape practice in exile and exodus (currently funded by the British Academy and Leverhulme Trust), and Universals of Linguistic Change in Language Obsolescence (previously funded by the Leverhulme Trust).