TEAM
Luca Lorenzetti
l.lorenzetti@unitus.it
Luca Lorenzetti is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Tuscia. His main research interests are: Italian lexicography and lexicology (he took part to the scientific direction of GRADIT - Great Italian dictionary of use, directed by Tullio De Mauro, Utet, Turin 1999); History of Italian Linguistics; Historical Dialectology; Linguistic Interference; Etymology; Historical Onomastics; Dialectal Varieties of Latin; Theoretical and Applied Morphosyntax.
Cristina Muru
muru.cristina@unitus.it
Cristina Muru has been Researcher in Linguistics at the University of Tuscia since 2012. Her research focuses on Language Contact from a historical perspective, Missionary Grammars, History of Language Science, and Tamil. She has focused on the Tamil language as it was described and analysed in early documents composed by Jesuit missionaries, as well as on language contact in India and in the Mediterranean area in the early Modern era. She has worked extensively on archive material, developing palaeographic and philological skills. She has also undertaken fieldwork research in India, in the Nilgiris among the Panya.
Peter K. Austin
pa2@soas.ac.uk
Peter Austin is Emeritus Professor at SOAS, University of London. His interests cover documentary, descriptive, theoretical, historical and applied linguistics. He has extensive fieldwork experience since 1972 on Australian Aboriginal languages.
Since 2011 he has been working with the Dieri Aboriginal Corporation on revitalisation of the Dieri language spoken in South Australia (see Dieri Wordpress).
Since 1995 he has been carrying out research on Sasak and Samawa, Austronesian languages spoken on Lombok and Sumbawa islands, eastern Indonesia, in collaboration with colleagues at Mataram University and Frankfurt University. His personal website is at www.peterkaustin.com.
Silvia Dal Negro
silvia.dalnegro@unibz.it
Full Professor of Linguistics at the Faculty of Education, Silvia Dal Negro has studied foreign languages and literatures at the university of Bergamo and has obtained a PhD in linguistics at Pavia. Before starting her job at unibz she has been tenured researcher at the Università del Piemonte Orientale where she has mainly worked in the research field of minority languages in the Alpine space. She is now active especially in the domains of contact linguistics and language education.
Moreno Vergari
moreno.vergari@ethnorema.it
Moreno Vergari is a linguist, Director of the journal Ethnorêma and President of the executive board of the Ethnorêma Association, an Italian non-profit. It works to promote study and research activities in the fields of linguistics, literary studies, ethnography, anthropology, history and in all sectors which relate to languages and cultures of the world. He is Coordinator of a development cooperation project for the Ogiek (Kenya), and Co-organizer, with the Free University of Bolzano-Bozen, of a series of workshops on Language Documentation (now in its seventh edition). He is particularly interested in documentation and description of the Saaho language of Eritrea and Ethiopia, and is responsible for the project Atlas of the Traditional Material Culture of the Saho. He has published two books and several articles on Saho, resulting from intensive fieldwork over the whole Saho-speaking area, in collaboration with members of the University of Naples “L’Orientale”, the University of Venice “Ca’ Foscari”, and local institutions.
Antonia Soriente
asoriente@unior.it
Antonia Soriente is Professor of Indonesian Language and Literature at the Oriental University of Naples, and mainly deals with linguistics of minority languages ​​of Borneo, together with contemporary Indonesian literature. Her academic training and her extensive fieldwork in Indonesia and Malaysia and her 10 years experience as a senior linguistic researcher for the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology in Jakarta, strengthened her interest in language documentation. Her main research field is the description and the documentation of Kenyah and Punan languages of Borneo. For the last three years she has been involved in a multidisciplinary international research project on the Maritime Cultural Resources of Indonesia and traditional boatbuilding in South Sulawesi where the methodology of maritime archaeology, linguistics and ethnography are employed.
Giancarlo Schirru
gschirru@unior.it
Giancarlo Schirru is Professor in Linguistics at the University of Naples "L’Orientale", in the Department of Asia, Africa and the Mediterranean. His research interests include phonetics and phonology, ancient and modern Romance dialectology, Indo-European historical-comparative linguistics with particular reference to Latin, Greek, Armenian, and Iranian traditions. He also studies the History of the Science of Language in the 19th and the 20th centuries.
Giorgio Banti
gb040249@gmail.com
Giorgio Banti has been a Professor the University of Basilicata (Potenza), and the University of Naples L’Orientale, where he has taught General and Historical Linguistics, and Somali Language and Literature. He is now a member of the Board of Directors of the ISMEO (International Association for Mediterranean and Oriental Studies). He has also taught in in the universities of Rome 1, Cassino, Hamburg, Bayreuth, Zurich, Addis Ababa, Djibouti, and Mogadishu (the National University of Somalia).
He has carried out extensive field research in former Somalia, Northern, Central and Eastern Ethiopia, Somaliland, Djibouti, Eritrea and Sudan.
His main research interests include Somali linguistics, literature and culture; Oromo linguistics, literature and culture; Saho linguistics, literature and culture; Old Harari linguistics and literature; Nara linguistics, literature and culture; Cushitic languages and literatures; Afroasiatic historical linguistics; Indo-European historical linguistics; Theory of historical linguistics and Linguistic archaeology; Language typology; Theory of information structure; Ethnolinguistics (aka Anthropological linguistics); Comparative poetry; Ajami writing systems in Africa; Development of literacy for unwritten languages; Language development; Language documentation; Forensic linguistics.
Francesca Moro
francesca.romana7@yahoo.it
Francesca Romana Moro obtained her B.A. degree in 2008 on Indonesian Language and Literature from the Oriental University of Naples, followed by a Research Masters in Linguistics at Leiden University in February 2011. She undertook her PhD in the Centre for Language Studies at the Radboud University Nijmegen (2011-2016), investigating contact-induced change among heritage speakers of Malay in the Netherlands. She was employed as a postdoctoral fellow at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (2015-2019) as part of the now-funded VICI Project “Reconstructing the past through languages of the present: the Lesser Sunda Islands” headed by Prof. Marian Klamer. Her research focuses on the Austronesian language Alorese, and neighbouring Papuan languages, investigating historical and ongoing contact phenomena. She has conducted descriptive fieldwork on Austronesian languages (Dampelas, Ambon Malay, Alorese) in various areas (Sulawesi, Ambon, Alor, Pantar, the Netherlands), by using a range of elicitation techniques. Since February 2020, she has been at the University of Insubria, Como, as a Postdoctoral Researcher (rtd-a).
Graziano Savà
gsava@unior.it
Italian (Sicilian) linguist Graziano Savà specialises in the documentation and description of minority and endangered languages of the Horn of Africa. He is the author of the only grammar of the Cushitic endangered language Ts’amakko (Savà 2005), and has documented other little-known languages of Ethiopia such as Ongota, Bayso, and Haro. He is also author of studies concerning historical linguistics and code-switching. Savà is presently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Oriental University in Naples, carrying out research on documentation of the Nilo-Saharan language Nara (from Eritrea).