Birgit Hellwig

Prof. Birgit Hellwig is a Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Cologne, specializing in language documentation, child language acquisition, and anthropological linguistics. Her research focuses on understudied languages such as Qaqet (Papua New Guinea), Tabaq (Sudan), and Goemai (Nigeria). She holds the Lichtenberg Professorship since 2014, funded by the Volkswagen Foundation. Her work integrates fieldwork, corpus linguistics, and cross-linguistic comparison to address issues in language endangerment, acquisition, and typology.

Educational Background:

• PhD (Linguistics) 2003: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics & Radboud University Nijmegen
• M.A. (African Linguistics) 1998: Universität Hamburg

Research Interests:

• Language documentation and revitalization
• Child language acquisition in multilingual contexts
• Semantic typology of motion events
• Language contact in West Chadic and Nilo-Saharan languages
• Corpus-driven linguistic analysis

Key Projects:

• "Documenting child language: The Qaqet Baining of Papua New Guinea" (longitudinal corpus)
• "The Acquisition Sketch Project" (cross-linguistic documentation framework)
• Documentation of Tabaq (Nubian) and Katla (Kordofanian)

Grants and Funding:

• Lichtenberg Professorship (2014–present)
• ARC Discovery Grant for Qaqet language documentation

Labs/Teams:

• Leading the Cologne Language Documentation Group
• Collaborator in the Language Documentation Reference Corpus (DoReCo)