Since 1996, he is a professor of German Linguistics at Philipps-Universität Marburg, Germany, now retired.

He has also worked at the universities of Bielefeld, Kassel, TU Berlin, and Düsseldorf.

He has done research primarily on the phonology and morphology of German, but also of other languages such as Chinese, and is best known for his book The Phonology of German (Oxford University Press 1996/22000), the standard work describing the sound system of the language.

The processing of language has been studied in numerous psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic experiments on word stress and phonotactic and rhythmic structure, with a focus on German, English, Polish, Russian, Egyptian Arabic, and Turkish.

[4] Besides his work in research and teaching, Wiese has served in various other academic functions, such as dean of the department, elected member of the linguistics board of the German Research Foundation, and president of the German Linguistics Society (DGfS) from 2006 to 2009.