• APLL17, 21-23 July: registration open

  The 17th International Conference on Austronesian and Papuan Languages and Linguistics (APLL) will take place from 21-23.07.2025 at the University of Cologne. Registration is now open: please visit https://apll17.sciencesconf.org/ and go to the ‘Registration’ tab in the upper left corner. A preliminary programme is also available on the conference website. Registration is open until May 31st. There is no registration fee for APLL17 but registration is obligatory for both presenters and audience members. We look forward to seeing you there!

   

• Multifactor authentication: Cisco Duo

• To protect your data and devices and to prevent cyberattacks, all students are required to use the multifactor authentication Cisco Duo starting May 5, 2025.

   

• PhD position available

  A PhD position is available for the Documenting Languages and Ethnobiological Knowledge (DocuLEK) project, funded jointly by the French and German research agencies (ANR-DFG)

   

• Vacancy Student Assistant (IT)

  The Department of Linguistics (General and Historical-Comparative Linguistics) has an immediate vacancy for a SHK or WHB in the IT area (between 9 and 19 hours per week). Please send applications in digital form to Dr Claudia Wegener (claudia.wegener[at]uni-koeln.de).

   

• LingCologne 2025: 22–23 May

  We cordially invite all interested parties to participate in LingCologne 2025, which will take place this year on 22 and 23 May 2025 under the theme ‘Feedback in Interaction’. 

   

• Lunch & Linguistics

   The Lunch & Linguistics lecture series invites researchers to present their projects in an informal setting. Dates and venue can be found in the program.

   

• Dr. Svenja Bonmann admitted to Junges Kolleg

  We congratulate Dr. Svenja Bonmann, who will be accepted as a fellow of the Young Academy (Junges Kolleg) of the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and Arts (Nordrhein-Westfälische Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Künste) on 1 January 2025. The fellowship not only offers financial freedom for her own research, but the admission is also an important honour that enables exchange with other excellent young researchers.

   

• DFG approves third funding phase for the CRC

  Congratulations on the third funding phase of the CRC Prominence in Language! Some of our department members are involved in sub-projects. Project B02 (sub-project leader Prof. Dr. Birgit Hellwig) investigates the encoding of participles in two East African languages with case splits and word order variation. Project B05 (sub-project leader Prof. Dr. Nikolaus Himmelmann and Dr. Sonja Riesberg) is researching prominence-related structures in languages with symmetrical diatheses and in Papuan languages, B08 (project leader Prof. Dr. Eugen Hill) focuses on Differential Object Marking in Nuristani, and project C09 (sub-project leader Prof. Dr. Nikolaus Himmelmann) is conducting mathematical and computer-aided research into explanatory approaches for phenomena of form and discourse prominence.

   

• Vice Dean for International Affairs: Prof. Birgit Hellwig

  Prof. Birgit Hellwig has been elected Vice Dean for International Affairs of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities for the term of office from 1 October 2024 to 30 September 2028. Congratulations!

   

News Archive of General and Historical Comparative Linguistics

• Aung Si & Aung Kyawphyo. 2025. Changing perceptions of ornamental plants in urban Yangon, Myanmar. Plants 14(4), 552.
• Aung Si & Nathan Badenoch. 2025. The question of universals in ethnobiological nomenclature: Re-examination with southeast Asian linguistic data. Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area 48(1): 1–4.
• Passmore, Sam, Birgit Hellwig, Rowena Garcia & Evan Kidd. 2025. The scientific and cultural cost of convenience sampling in the face of rising language endangerment: Highlighting the role of language acquisition. Open Mind 9. 501–514.
• Bauer, Anastasia, Patrick C Trettenbrein, Federica Amici, Aleksandra Ćwiek, Susanne Fuchs, Lisa-Marie Krause, Anna Kuder, et al. 2025. Data Collection in Multimodal Language and Communication Research: A Flexible Decision Framework. (Preprint)
• Çabuk‐Ballı, Sakine, Jekaterina Mazara, Aylin C. Küntay, Birgit Hellwig, Barbara B. Pfeiler, Paul Widmer & Sabine Stoll. 2025. Negation in first language acquisition: Universal or language-specific? Cognitive Science 49. e70044.
• Hellwig, Birgit. 2024. Caused accompanied motion in a direction: BRING and TAKE in Katla (Niger-Congo, Sudan). In James Essegbey & Enoch Aboh (eds), Predication in African languages, 238-262. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
• Laureck, Lukas. 2024. Three-participant events in the Wagi dialect of Beria. Studies in African Linguistics 53(1). 97-119.
• Walker, Katherine. 2024. Conditional Indexing. Amsterdam: LOT.
• Dekker, Peter, Sonja Gipper & Bart de Boer. 2024. Conversational priming in repetitional responses as a mechanism in language change: Evidence form agent-based modelling. Linguistics Vanguard.

• Bonifazi, Anna und Pinelopi Ioannidou. (erscheinend) 2024. Cross- and multimodal anaphoric references in mystery movies: a cognitive approach. Yearbook of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association 12. 229–258.