Language Challenges is a collaborative research initiative that brings together researchers from linguistics, cognitive sciences, psychology, media studies and philosophy with the goal of developing a new understanding of linguistic communication that focuses on the adaptability of communicative strategies and resources and puts anticipatory trouble management at its center. Please click here for further information. This initiative is funded through the Cluster Development Program within the Excellent Research Support Program (ERSP) of the University of Cologne.

The Acquisition Sketch Project is an initiative that aims at increasing knowledge about the acquisition of understudied languages. The project combines insights from Child Language Acquisition and Language Documentation, providing a detailed description of how to collect data and write an “Acquisition Sketch” of a language based on as little as 5 hours of naturalistic data. Please click here for further information. The set-up of the project was supported by the joint German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and Universities Australia funding scheme (2019-2021), which facilitated workshops and regular meetings between the team members based in Germany (Birgit Hellwig from the University of Cologne, and Shanley Allen from the University of Kaiserslautern-Landau) and their Australian counterparts (Lucy Davidson, Rebecca Defina and Barb Kelly from the University of Melbourne, and Evan Kidd from the Australian National University).

Together with Alice Mitchell, Gertrud Schneider-Blum and Mandy Lorenzen, we investigate prominence relations in East African languages where different types of split case marking systems interact with constituent order. Using spoken language corpora, we identify the features that trigger differential marking and study their interaction and variability in languages across the region. This is a continuation of the project “Split Ergativity in Tima” (together with Gerrit Dimmendaal and Gertrud Schneider-Blum) with its in-depth focus on one type of split case marking and its diachronic developments. Please click here for further information. This project is part of the Collaborative Research Centre 1252 Prominence in Language, funded by the DFG.

In this project, we document the acquisition of Qaqet, a Baining language of Papua New Guinea, integrating perspectives from language documentation, language acquisition and language socialization. Please click here for further information. This project is funded through the Lichtenberg Programme of the Volkswagen Foundation. It continues a pilot project funded through the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme (2012-2013).

In close cooperation between Anna Margetts (Monash University), Sonja Riesberg (LACITO Langues et Civilisations à Tradition Orale, CNRS) and Birgit Hellwig (University of Cologne), we bring together a team of researchers to investigate the crosslinguistic encoding of the concepts BRING and TAKE (i.e. Caused Accompanied Motion, CAM) on the basis of spoken language corpora of minority languages from the Americas, Austronesia and Papua. Our proposed typology identifies patterns and constraints in the linguistic expression of CAM events, and showcases the relevance of documentary linguistics for linguistic typology. This project is funded through the DobeS (Documentation of Endangered Languages) Programme of the Volkswagen Foundation.

This project documents and describes Qaqet, a Baining language of Papua New Guinea, covering all levels of language (phonetics, phonology, morphosyntax, semantics and pragmatics, discourse organization) and places the language in its diachronic and areal context. The project idea originated during a mobility grant from the joint German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and Australian Group of Eight funding scheme (2010-2011), and the project was supported through a Future Fellowship of the Australian Research Council (2010-2014). The database and analytical insights from this project continue to inform my present-day research and form the basis for current projects.

In a series of projects, I have worked on the description and documentation of Tabaq (a Kordofan Nubian language) and Katla (a Niger-Congo language) of Sudan. Tabaq was originally spoken in the north-western Nuba Mountains, but many Tabaq have now left this area and have migrated to various urban centers of North Sudan. There are currently about 1800 people who consider themselves Tabaq and who speak this language to varying degrees of fluency. In close cooperation between the University of Cologne (Birgit Hellwig, Gertrud Schneider-Blum) and the University of Khartoum (Abdelrahim Mugaddam, Khaleel Bakheet Khaleel, Khalifa Jabr Eldar), we conducted a sociolinguistic survey on language use and attitudes, and created an annotated corpus of various genres. The Tabaq survey and corpus complement our own earlier research on the neighboring non-related Niger-Congo languages Tima (Schneider-Blum, since 2006) and Katla (Hellwig, 2006-2008). The three parallel corpora now allow us to investigate convergences and differences among the languages, and to place our findings in a historical and sociolinguistic context, and they continue to inform our present-day research. The projects were funded through a Postdoctoral Fellowship from La Trobe University, Melbourne, and a Major Documentation Grant from the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme.

From 1999 to 2005, my research focused on Goemai, a West Chadic language that is spoken in Central Nigeria, resulting in a large corpus of elicited, staged and naturalistic data, as well as many publications on all aspects of the language. This research was made possible through a PhD scholarship from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen and an Individual Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme.