• 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!

• Vacancy Research Assistant (f/m/d) at the Department of Linguistics in the field of Discourse Linguistics

  A full-time post-doctoral position is available at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Cologne from 1st of March 2025. It is limited until 29.02.2028. Particularly welcome is an interest in spontaneous and/or professional storytelling, multimodal discourse segmentation, classical cognitive-linguistic topics such as metaphor, metonymy and blending, and the interface between syntax, prosody and pragmatics. In addition, 4 hours of teaching per week (= 2 courses/semester) are included in this position. For further information please click here.

• The Unimagazin publishes article about the fieldwork at the Department of Linguistics

  The Unimagazin reports in its article “When words are lost” from Octobre 17th 2024, on the fieldwork of our linguists Professor Dr. Nikolaus P. Himmelmann, Dr. Maria Bardají and Dr. Claudia Wegener. They document previously undescribed languages in close cooperation with native speakers. There are often only a few native speakers of these languages left and it is particularly important to treat them and the data collected with respect and trust. You can access the entire article via the link in the title.

• Honourable mention for Maria Bardaji's dissertation

  At the Greenberg Award 2024 of the Association for Linguistic Typology (ALT), Maria Bardaji's dissertation Nominalization in Totoli and other western Austronesian languages was awarded an Honourable Mention. Her dissertation was published by Pacific Linguistics. The laudatio states:
  "Bardaji’s thesis is concerned with the relationship between nominalizations and symmetrical voice constructions in Austronesian languages. Bardaji’s thesis combines folk tales, explanatory texts, community events, musical events, stimuli tasks and elicitation to answer important theoretical questions. It represents an impressive integration of language documentation and linguistic typology. In addition to this, the committee felt that the thesis made novel contributions to documentary/descriptive methodology in relation to typology by probing the notion of at-issue content in these languages in a systematic way."
  Congratulations!

• DGfS macht Schule: Language documentation with Maria Bardají

  Maria Bardají explains how language documentation and linguistic field research works based on her work with the Tolitoli in northern Sulawesi (Indonesia).

• Research team from Cologne University deciphers curious enigmatic writing from antiquity and receives funding for further research

  Much of what is known today about the Kushana empire and its inhabitants comes from Chinese, Greek or Roman sources. Until now, no one has been able to read some of the written records of this Central Asian culture, as the writing system in which they were written had not been deciphered. The Cologne linguists Svenja Bonmann, Jakob Halfmann and Natalie Korobzow have now achieved a breakthrough: the mystery of the unknown Kushana script has been solved. The Cologne University Magazine also reported on this here and here. The linguists from Cologne and Würzburg are now receiving third-party funding of €200,000 from the Fritz Thyssen Foundation to continue researching the evidence of the writing system. Click here for the press release of the UoC.

News Archive of General and Historical Comparative Linguistics

• Suter, Edgar 2024. Benefactive constructions: A comparative study of the Huon Peninsula languages. Language and Linguistics in Melanesia 42. 128–202.

• Hill, Eugen, Simon Fries, Natalie Korobzow, Laura Günther & Svenja Bonmann. 2024. Towards a New Reconstruction of the Proto‑Yeniseian Sound System. Part II: Word‑Final Consonants. International Journal of Eurasian Linguistics 6(2), 216–293.

• Wiemer, Björn, Eugen Hill, Daniel Kölligan & Jan-Niklas Linnemeier. 2024. Between the birth and death of future tenses. Related languages as a natural lab for research into grammatical change (LINCOM Studies in Indo-European Linguistics 58). München: LINCOM EUROPA.

• Fries, Simon and Natalie Korobzow. 2024. On the dating of sound changes and its implications for language relationship. The case of Proto-Yeniseian *p- > Ket h-, Yugh f-. Diachronica 41(4). 525–555. (Online first).

• Coenen, Pascal. 2024. Non-canonical quantification in Old Persian: The adverb vasai̯. Folia Linguistica.

• Bonmann, Svenja, Sonja Riesberg & Nikolaus P. Himmelmann. 2024. Differential object marking in Western Malayo-Polynesian symmetrical voice languages. Linguistic Typology.

• Halfmann, Jakob, Svenja Bonmann, Simon Fries & Natalie Korobzow. 2023. A New Reading of the Bactrian Part of the Dašt-i Nāwur Trilingual (DN I). Indo-Iranian Journal 67(1), 5–51.

• Fries, Simon & Svenja Bonmann. 2023. The Development of Arin kul ‘water’ ~ Kott ûl, Ket ¹u·l’, Yugh ¹ur and Its Typological Background. International Journal of Eurasian Linguistics 5(2), 183–198.

• Fries, Simon, Jakob Halfmann, Eugen Hill & Denise Hübner. 2023. From noun to future tense. The functional diachrony of the l-future in the Nuristani languages and its typological background. Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung (STUF) 76(1), 53–85.

• Bonmann, Svenja, Jakob Halfmann, Natalie Korobzow & Bobomullo Bobomulloev. 2023. A Partial Decipherment of the Unknown Kushan Script. Transactions of the Philological Society 121(2). 293–329.