About

  • I am a professor of linguistics at Heinrich-Heine-Universität in Düsseldorf. My work bridges several subdisciplines in linguistics, including language documentation, typology, formal semantics, morpho-syntax and corpus linguistics.
  • Since a lot of people have been wondering about my name, here is a page with instructions for pronunciation.
  • I live in Düsseldorf with my philosopher husband David Löwenstein.
  • Supervision requests: I take on few PhD students, and only if they’re fully funded and their thesis contributes substantially to the documentation of less-described languages. If you don’t have a PhD position with me, you’ll need a project proposal for a scholarship application before I talk to you.

If I have supported you at some point in your life, you don’t owe me anything, but I like getting postcards.

My handle on bluesky is @kilinguistics.

Here is my account on Mastodon

News

  • Coming soon: Oceanic Word Units
    My proposal for a project on Oceanic Word Units was recently approved by the German Research Society! We’ll start in 2024, but I’m already excited and looking forward to diving into vowel harmony, clitics, and the morphosyntax of subject markers. You can read the proposal here.
  • Afaka font
    I regularly go a little overboard when designing puzzles for the German Olympiad of Linguistics, but for one of this year’s puzzles, I really outnerded myself. I designed a True Type Font for the writing system Afaka, which was developed for the creole language Ndyuka. It was conceived in 1910 by Afáka Atumisi and is … Continue reading “Afaka font”
  • Custom typological maps with R
    I used to plot my typological language data to geo-spatial maps with Generic Mapping Tools, which is awesome, and where a simple two-liner will do the job. But I found this hard to use in teaching, since it doesn’t run smoothly on everyone’s operating system. So it’s time for me to move on and learn … Continue reading “Custom typological maps with R”
  • Wrapping up 2022: more talks and publications
    I haven’t been posting regularly about recent talks and publications, so here are a few more highlights from the second part of 2022: