معرفی
Benjamín Molineaux is a Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh's School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences (PPLS), where he has been a member of the Linguistics and English Language Department since 2014, first as a postdoctoral fellow and then as a lecturer starting in April 2021. He serves as Depute Director of the Angus McIntosh Centre for Historical Linguistics (AMC) and convenes several academic groups including the English Language Research Group and AMC Catchup Sessions. His work focuses on historical phonology and morphology, particularly of Mapudungun (the language of the Mapuche people) and Older Scots.
Molineaux's research interests center on historical phonology, morpho-phonology, stress systems, and the languages of the Americas. He has developed the Corpus of Historical Mapudungun (CHM), which spans 400 years of Mapudungun textual history from 1606-1930, and is currently leading the Comparative Historical Corpus of the Southern Cone (CHiCo-SC) project funded by a 2025 Leverhulme Research Project Grant. His work combines traditional linguistic analysis with digital humanities approaches, creating linguistically tagged corpora that enable detailed study of historical language change.
Molineaux's publications reveal a strong focus on Mapudungun phonology and historical development, with significant contributions to understanding stress systems, coronal alternations, and dental-alveolar contrasts in this indigenous American language. He also maintains an active research program on Older Scots, particularly examining spelling-phoneme correspondences in early documents. His interdisciplinary approach bridges historical linguistics, corpus linguistics, and digital humanities methodologies.
- Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship (2018-2021)
- Leverhulme Research Project Grant (2025)
Molineaux supervises multiple PhD students across Linguistics and English Language and Hispanic Studies, with research focusing on phonology and historical linguistics, particularly related to Scots or New World languages. He is actively involved in teaching courses on Historical Phonology, Cross-linguistic Variation, and the History of Scots. His current research projects include the CHiCo-SC project, which brings together researchers from Chile, Argentina, and Scotland to study Patagonian and Tierra del Fuego languages. Molineaux also developed Kintun'emülpeyüm, a mobile Mapudungun-Spanish Dictionary app available for iPhone, Android, and web platforms.
