Advances in Evolutionary Phonology
Evolutionary Phonology seeks to explain why certain sound patterns have the typological distributions they do. Why are certain sound patterns extremely common, while others are rare? What factors play a role in determining similar sound patterns across languages? And what is the ultimate explanation for the striking identity between recurrent context-dependent instances of sound change and recurrent alternation types across the world's languages? [more]
Language Areality in Ancient Eurasia
In the past decades much research has been done on areal patterns in the world. Were these areal patterns already present in the times of the ancient languages, especially in the second millenium B.C.? Did areal phenomena exist in that time that did not survive into recent times? If the observable and provable areal patterns changed, why did that happen? [more]
Animacy and mythology in Hantxa Kuin (Cashinahua)
 Cashinahua – or Hantxa Kuin as it is called by its speakers – belongs to the Panoan family. All Panoan languages are concentrated in one geographic region, the Amazonian lowlands in Eastern Peru and in adjacent parts of Brazil and Bolivia. The project aims at building up a comprehensive documentation of the Cashinahua language and culture at its current stage in Peru and in Brazil. [more]
A text documentation of N|uu
The project documents the last South African San language and the only surviving member of the !Ui branch of the isolate family Tuu (a.k.a. "Southern Khoisan"). The team consists of three PhD students and the applicant. It is funded by the ELDP and starts in October 2007. [more]
Correlating Genes and Languages
The project aims at examining the putative correlations between certain genetic features and linguistic markers in various regions of the world, contact situations, and on different scales (dialects vs. languages). [more]
Cross-linguistic aspects of the structure of the nominal lexicon
A concept expressed by a monomorphemic word in one language may be expressed by a morphologically complex word (a compound, derivative, etc.) in another. [more]
The Acquisition of Subjects in English, Russian and Polish
This project investigates the well known phenomenon of subject ommision in early child language. The goal of the project is to find out whether the degree of overt subject expression in the target grammar of a language influences the pathways children take to learn this category. [more]
 Comparison of the communicative environment of young language-learning children in two cultures
The communicative environments in which children grow up differ considerably across cultures. However, there are hardly any quantitative studies of the input children receive in non-western, rural societies. The goal of this project is to quantitatively assess and compare the communicative contexts of children growing up in two very diverse cultures, namely rural Nepal (Chintang) and rural Germany. [more]
 A Grammar of Hinuq
The project aims at the description of Hinuq (Nakh-Daghestanian). The description will include the phonology, morphology and syntax of Hinuq as well as a couple of texts and a short dictionary. [more]
 Marked Nominative/Absolutive Case Systems
In most languages, an accusative case will be longer than a nominative case. This is a well-known cross-linguistic generalization. In contrast, there are a few languages in which the nominative case is marked relative to the accusative. This project investigates these exceptional cases to learn more about the possibilities of human languages. [more]
Documentation of Enets: digitization and analysis of legacy field materials and fieldwork with last speakers
 Our fieldwork-based project documents Enets, an almost extinct Northern Samoyedic language spoken on the Taimyr Peninsula, Siberia. It is funded by the ELDP for the period 01.02.2008 – 31.07.2011. [more]
 An Acoustically-based Phonology and Morphophonology of Siwi (Berber)
The project aims at a phonological analysis of Siwi and an overwiev of its formal morphology. It was partially funded by Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes. [more]
Endangered Moluccan Languages: Eastern Indonesia & the Dutch diaspora
This project aims to document five previously undescribed languages: Allang (Ambon Island), Haruku (Haruku Island), the language spoken in the villages of Amahei, Makariki, Ruta, and Soahuku (Seram Island), Nusalaut (Nusalaut Island), and the language spoken in the villages of Tenga-Tenga, Tial, Tulehu, Liang and Waai (Ambon Island). A cross-linguistic analysis of several grammatical aspects of Central Moluccan languages will also draw on four previously documented languages (Alune, Buru, Larike, Nuaulu). [more]
Traditional Jambi Malay
This project studies Traditional Jambi Malay, an endangered Malay variety spoken in Jambi Province in southeast Sumatra, Indonesia. The Malay language originated in Sumatra, and dozens of Malay dialects are spoken on the island, none of which have been well described. Most native speakers of Malay live in Sumatra, many more than in Malaysia, for example. Yet there is not even one thorough grammatical description of a Sumatran Malay dialect. One of the expected results of this project would be the first detailed description of such a dialect. [more]
Language and Thought: Universality and Relativism
Almost anybody who has taken part in interactions between native English speakers and Indonesian speakers has had occasion to observe striking differences in how people from both groups deal with the notion of time: how they conceive time, how they value time, and how they plan and execute their activities in time. In this project, we plan to study a variety of conceptual categories which are encoded in significantly different fashion in English and in Indonesian. [more]
Acquisition of Jakarta Indonesian
The goal of the Acquisition Project was to record, transcribe, and enter into a computerized database, a corpus of naturalistic data from a large sample of Jakarta Indonesian child language. [more]
Loanword Typology: Comparative Study of Lexical Borrowability
In this project, we studied lexical borrowing patterns in 41 languages from around the world. Each language was the responsibility of a single author, an expert of the language and what is known about its history and its contact languages. For each language, we assembled lexical data for a fixed list of 1460 meanings. [more]
Quantitative approaches to lexical comparison
Lexical material ("words") is one important source of information to establish genealogical relations between languages. We investigate quantitative methods to assist linguists in this kinds of historical-comparative research. [more]
 A Pan-dialectal Documentation of Taa
The project aims at the documentation of the language complex Taa spoken in southwestern Botswana and central-eastern Namibia. The project is funded within the DoBeS framework of the VW-Foundation and is carried out by an interdisciplinary team of three linguists, one anthopologist, and two student assistants. [more]
Northwest Iranian Project
The project aims to describe how the 7 + 2 Northwest Iranian subgroups (henceforth NWI) are interrelated and to describe a possible scenario of how these branches developed. To conduct comparative work on NWI, some reference to SWI is necessary, but Eastern Iranian is for the time excluded from the scope of this project. The thrust of the project is synchronic comparative work, but reference to historical data will also of necessity be included. [more]
The African Lexis in Jamaican Creole and Its Historical Significance
This project undertakes the first comprehensive treatment of the African words which entered Jamaican Creole during the plantation era (1655-1838). [more]
Jamaican Lexicography Project (Jamlex)
The Jamaican Lexicography Project (Jamlex) aims to produce for Jamaican (Creole) an electronic dictionary on historical principles [more]
 Description and Documentation of Khwarshi
The aim of the project is to write a comprehensive grammar of Khwarshi. The grammar will consist of several parts: phonology, morphology, syntax, plus a small lexicon and texts. [more]
Yurok Language Project
 The Yurok language is spoken along the Klamath River in northwestern
California, as it has been for centuries. The Yurok Language Project, started in 2001, combines fieldwork with Yurok elders, community work, and analysis of earlier fieldnotes. Its goals
are to document and describe the language, create teaching and learning materials, and make as much information on the Yurok language accessible to those interested in the language. [more]
Documentation of Betawi
Betawi is the indigenous Malay dialect of Jakarta. The speakers were formed from the mixing of ethnicities coming to Jakarta during Dutch colonial times. The inflows were adequately gradual to let the constant stream of immigrants be absorbed into a distinct ethnic group. This ethnic group speaks with their own dialect called Betawi Malay which is different from other dialects of Malay. Nowadays it is only spoken by older people in certain villages on the outskirts of the city. The younger generation tends to speak Jakarta Indonesian. [more]
Documentation of Kenyah
 The objective of this project, co-funded by the Culture Unit of UNESCO office, Jakarta, is to document and preserve two endangered Kenyah isolects, Lebu’ Kulit and Òma Lóngh. Few descriptive studies of Kenyah exist, and most of them are unpublished. No thorough description of any Kenyah isolect has ever been produced. The only existing documents in Kenyah are a few wordlists and a Bible translation in one isolect, Leppo’ Tau. [more]
The Phonology of Jakarta Indonesian
Given the importance of Jakarta Indonesian, it is surprising that its phonology has never been systematically described and analyzed. This new project aims to correct this situation. [more]
 Maya writing and historical linguistics
Through comparative reconstruction and epigraphic work we try to track the development of Lowland Maya languages in the context of the cultural evolution of the area. The project also involves the build-up of a Pan-Chronic Mayan Dictionary containing not only cognate sets and reconstructions but also, ideally, all attested lexemes throughout the Mayan languages. [more]
 The World Atlas of Language Structures - WALS
In 2005, the World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) was published as a book and CD-ROM. Based on a core sample of 200 languages, WALS documents the geographical distribution of approximately 120 structural features in the world’s languages. WALS for the first time permits the rapid assessment of the areal spread of a wide range of linguistic features. [more]
Typology of Content Interrogatives
Every language has specific words that are used to ask for a specific answer. For example, the English word who asks for a human being, or when for a time. This project investigates what kind of different categorizations languages have in the structure of these content interrogatives. [more]
The Acquisition of Passive Voice in English and Indonesian
This study investigates how young children form passive sentences in English and Indonesian. When using the passive voice the grammar of English requires that a so-called passive form of the verb be used. In contrast to English, Indonesian passives are expressed without an auxiliary verb, by adding the prefix di- to the verb. [more]
Bilingual Child Language Acquisition
In this project the acquisition of bilingualism by various children in different linguistic environment is studied. One subproject investigates an Italian/Indonesian situation, and another a Indonesian/Javanese bilingual setting. [more]
 A Reference Grammar of Ọ̀kọ
This project is on Ọ̀kọ̣, the language of the Ogori and Magongo communities of Nigeria. The main objective is to provide a reference grammar of the language.
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