Florian Coulmas is Senior Professor of the Faculty of Social Sciences at Duisburg-Essen University. From 2004 to 2014, he served as director of the German Institute for Japanese Studies, Tokyo, and he has held appointments at Georgetown University, Washington D.C., the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics, Tokyo, and Chuo University, Tokyo. He is the author of Writing and Society (CUP, 2014) and editor of Language Regimes in Transformation (Mouton de Gruyter, 2007) and The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Writing Systems (Blackwell, 1999). He is also Associate Editor of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language.