Martin HASPELMATH
Martin Haspelmath is an internationally renowned German linguist specialising in the field of language typology.
He is Honorary Professor of Linguistics at the University of Leipzig and has been a Senior Research Fellow at the Max-Planck-Institut für evolutionäre Anthropologie (Leipzig, Germany) since 2020 and also from 1998 to 2015.
From 2015 to 2020 he was a senior researcher at the Max-Planck-Institut Menschheitsgeschichte (Jena, Germany). He held several other scientific positions at the Freie Universität Berlin, the University of Bamberg (Germany) and the Universita di Pavia (Italy) and taught at the Summer Institute of the Linguistic Society of America (1995 edition in Albuquerque, New Mexico). He is a member of the Academia Europaea (Humanities class, Linguistics section) and was President of the Societas Linguistica Europaea in 2015.
After studying at the universities of Vienna, Cologne, Buffalo and Moscow, he received a PhD in linguistics from the Freie Universität Berlin in 1993. His thesis, written under the supervision of Ekkehard König, was on the typological study of indefinite pronouns. He also produced a grammar book of Lezgin, a Caucasian language belonging to the Lezginic group of the Nakho-Dagestanian language family, which is spoken mainly in southern Dagestan and northern Azerbaijan (as well as in Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan). It is a "vulnerable" language according to UNESCO's Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger. Linguistically, Lezgin is characterised by the absence of nominal classes and by a large number of cases (18).
Subsequently, Martin Haspelmath's scientific interests have broadened to include, in addition to linguistic typology, syntactic and morphological theory, language change and languages in contact. He defines himself as a general linguist whose main scientific goal is the discovery and explanation of language universals. In 2015, he was awarded an ERC Advanced Grant for a major project on this topic.
In addition to being the author of a remarkable linguistic output (123 articles, 4 books as author and 10 as co-editor, 44 reviews), both in terms of quality and scope (17,500 citations, h-index of 75 according to Google Scholar) and diversity, Martin Haspelmath is a researcher who is strongly committed to the open science movement and to free access to scientific knowledge. He is co-founder of Language Science Press, a scientific publisher specialised in the publication of open access and systematically peer-reviewed books on linguistic issues. Indeed, all his publications are freely available on his personal web page. Furthermore, in the spirit of open science, he is co-editor of the World Atlas of Language Structure, a typological database that is fully and freely accessible online, for which he authored six chapters. The WALS is an essential tool for researchers, teachers and students of language typology, as well as for anyone with an interest in language diversity.
