Starting on November 1, 2025, Anna Bonifazi (IfL, Diiskurslinguistik) will be the general coordinator of STORYTEL, a three-year Erasmus+ project coordinated by the University of Cologne, and involving the University of Bologna, the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, and the University of Murcia. The full title of the project is: "At the roots of multimodality: Learning from smartphone-based audiovisual recordings of conversational storytelling". STORYTEL focuses on spontaneous storytelling embedded in conversations, a still underestimated and yet primordial form of communication - the origin of all contemporary digital and telecinematic forms of storytelling. The project will reinforce the EU leadership in the study of large AI language models by unlocking the multimodal complexity of telling stories in human face-to-face communication. At the moment, the Cologne scientific and administrative team includes Sonja Gipper (IfL ASW), Martine Grice (IfL Phonetics), Sandra Debreslioska (IfL DL),  Juman Al-qaoud (IfL DL), Madeleine Frings (IfL DL), Felix Rau (DCH),  Øyvind Eide (IHD), Lüder Schmidt (FG1), and Nina Kind (D7). Most of all, STORYTEL foresees the active participation of students all the way through! More soon - an ad hoc website will be available shortly.

• New publication: Debreslioska, Sandra, Anna Kuder & Pamela Perniss. 2025. The palm-up open hand gesture across language modalities: A comparison of German and DGS (German Sign Language), Journal of Pragmatics 249: 99-119. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2025.08.008.
• New publication: Bonifazi, Anna. Forthcoming. The Special Grammar of Multimodal Macro-Segments in Oral Epic Storytelling. In The Special Grammar of Traditional Literature: Studies Building upon Albert Lord's "Special Grammar”, R. Person (ed.). Boston and Leiden: Brill.
• New publication: Bonifazi, Anna & David F. Elmer. 2016 (online). Visuality in Bosniac and Homeric Epic. Classics@14. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies. 2024 (print). In Singers and Tales in the Twenty-First Century, D. F. Elemer and P. McMurray (eds.), 123-154. The Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature. Distributed by Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA.
• Are you interested in the transcription of conversations? Here we have a brief tutorial by a PhD student of our Department of Linguistics about the 2022-launched software DOTE!

• Job posting: Professorship in General and Comparative Linguistics (W2) with tenure track (W3) (f/m/d)

  Our institute has a vacancy for a W2 professorship (tenure track W3) in General and Comparative Linguistics to be filled at the earliest possible date (application deadline 16 January 2026). Further information

   

• Job posting: 3 Postdoctoral Researchers (f/m/x)

  A new third-party project funded by the VolkswagenStiftung (‘Exploring an unknown language in an unknown writing system: The Isthmus script’) will begin in April 2026. The Department of Linguistics is seeking to fill three full-time postdoctoral research positions (f/m/x) for this project. More information

   

• EU-financed project on „Conversational Storytelling“

  On November 1st 2025, “STORYTEL - At the roots of multimodality: Learning from smartphone-based audiovisual recordings of conversational storytelling”, will launch. This three year Erasmus+ project is coordinated by the University of Cologne and involves the University of Bologna, the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, and the University of Murcia. The scientific and administrative team in Cologne includes: Anna Bonifazi (project manager, IfL DL),  Sonja Gipper (IfL ASW), Martine Grice (IfL Phonetik), Sandra Debreslioska (IfL DL), Juman Al-qaoud (IfL DL), Madeleine Frings (IfL DL), Felix Rau (DCH), Øyvind Eide (IHD), Lüder Schmidt (FG1) and Nina Kind (D7). 

   

• Millions in funding for research into indigenous languagest

  The Volkswagen Foundation is funding a project by Dr. Svenja Bonmann to analyse an unknown Central American writing system and attempt to assign it to a language / Approximately one million euros in funding over three years.

   

• Kleine Fächer im Portrait: Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft

  Sonja Gipper and Birgit Hellwig introduce the subject of "General Linguistics" in a new blog post from kleinefaecher.de.

   

• The European Huns had ancient Siberian roots

  A linguistic study proves that the European Huns and their Asian ancestors spoke the same Palaeo-Siberian language. This result refutes the previously assumed Turkish.