 Languages and language groups which we are studying
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An Atlas of the Araxes-Iran Linguistic Area
This project investigates contact phenomena leading to shared linguistic features among six different language families spoken in the South Caucasus (Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan), northern Iraq, northern Iran, and eastern Turkey. Data come primarily from published sources of naturalistic speech, supplemented by fieldwork in poorly documented languages and include some 330 phonological, grammatical, and lexical features. [more]
A grammar of Yakkha
Yakkha is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Eastern Nepal. The project will result in a grammar, a dictionary and a text corpus. [more]
A grammar of Bezhta
This project aims at the description of Bezhta. The grammar will include phonology, morphology and syntax. [more]
A grammar of Yeri
Yeri is a Torricelli language spoken in Sandaun Province, Papua New Guinea. The language is spoken in a single village called Yapunda, and is severely endangered, with between 60 and 80 speakers. The youngest generation speaks only Tok Pisin, and speakers under 40 often speak a simplified variety of the language. [more]
Dialectal and cultural diversity among Evens in Siberia
Ėven is a Northern Tungusic language spoken over a vast area of northeastern Siberia, from the Lena-Jana watershed in the west to the coast of the Oxotsk Sea, Chukotka, and Kamchatka in the east. [more]
Documentation of ‡Hȍã with a focus on contact influence
The purpose of this project is to document the highly endangered language ‡Hȍã. It is spoken in the Kalahari region in southern Botswana in the Kweneng district. [more]
Documentation of Ternate Malay
Ternate Malay is the indigenous Malay dialect of the Island Ternate. [more]
 Documentation of the Tlapanec language
Since 1991 I have been describing different aspects of the grammar of the Otomanguean language Tlapanec as spoken in Azoyú (Guerrero, southern Mexico). It is a complicated tonal language with unusual features of reference-tracking, case marking, and inflectional morphology. [more]
Electronic Grammaticography
Descriptive linguistic content is still usually presented in book form. This project explores ways how descriptive grammars can be published on the Internet. In a trivial sense, this can be made by publishing a pdf on the author's homepage. [more]
Inheritance and contact in a language complex: the case of Taa varieties (Tuu family)
Taa, the only surviving member of the Tuu family (formerly "Southern Khoisan") with a substantial number of speakers, is a large cluster of dialects spoken by small bands of former hunter-gatherers (commonly referred to as "San") and stretching geographically from east-central Namibia from the Nossob River over the former Aminuis reserve into the Ghanzi and Kgalagadi Districts of Botswana up to a line Okwa-Tsetseng-Dutlwe-Werda. Mutual intelligibility usually exists between neighboring varieties, but differences between geographically remote dialects can amount to a linguistic distance found between languages. However, the dialectal diversity of Taa is still hardly documented. [more]
Language Contact in Indonesia
Nearly 800 languages are spoken in Indonesia, in addition to Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia), the national language. The great majority of Indonesians are therefore proficient in at least two languages, their local home language and Indonesian. This makes Indonesia an ideal location in which to study language contact. [more]
Language Contact in Sri Lanka
This project investigates the interaction between the languages of Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka has, among all linguistic areas, the decisive advantage of being rather small with regard to the languages concerned (half a dozen or less) and being geographically clearly defined, viz.. by the Indian Ocean. [more]
Linguistic Field Work in Riau Province, Indonesia
When I first travelled to Riau province in Indonesia, all I knew about the region was what I had read in one place or another. The population was reported to be mostly ethnically Malay: for example, the Routledge atlas paints the entire province in a solid homogeneous yellow, standing for Malay. And the local dialect, together with that of the neighbouring Malaysian province of Johor, was reputed to be that which formed the basis for the standardization of Malay/Indonesian, the so-called "Johor-Riau Malay". [more]
The Javanese Dialect Mapping Project
 The Javanese dialect mapping project aims to collect, document, and analyze various aspects of a number of Javanese dialects. Focus is given to in depth, naturalistic speech recordings, with the addition of word lists and elicitations. As part of the project, we are ‘debunking’ the myth of a ‘standard’ Javanese, based on the Surakarta and Yogyakarta varieties. [more]
The Kalahari Basin area: a 'Sprachbund' on the verge of extinction
The KBA project attempts to untangle some aspects of the complex linguistic and population history of the southern African groups speaking languages other than from the Bantu family. These are commonly subsumed under the unsubstantiated concept of a “Khoisan” family but might turn out to share certain traits because of convergence processes within a geographical area. The project will pursue a two-tiered approach, investigating southern Africa as a linguistic area from a broad perspective as well as offering fine-scaled studies of individual contact situations. The overall approach is a multidisciplinary one in involving linguists, molecular anthropologists and social anthropologists. [more]
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