After studying philosophy,
pedagogy, English, and German at the universities of
Heidelberg,
Reading, and
Göttingen and the "
Habilitation" at the
University of Regensburg in 1980, Markus is (co-) author or (co-) editor of 22 scholarly books and some 120 articles. He was also co-editor of the book series
Austrian Studies in English (formerly
Wiener Beiträge zur Philologie). His main achievement as a corpus linguist, however, is the creation of an online version of
Joseph Wright's comprehensive
English Dialect Dictionary (1898-1905),
EDD Online, which, by its software, allows for an access to English dialects worldwide from 1700 to 1903. Markus continued to be director of the
EDD Online project, initiated by him in 2005, until its completion in 2022. With his book
Literaturlinguistik (2025), he explores the cooperation of linguistics and literary studies. In 2006, a
Festschrift was dedicated to Manfred Markus. == Personal life ==