Kristine Bentzen

Professor Kristine Bentzen holds a position in Nordic Linguistics at UiT The Arctic University of Norway's Department of Language and Culture. Her affiliations include the AcqVA research group (Acquisition, Variation & Attrition) and involvement in projects like DASAGO (North Sami Child Language Acquisition). Her research focuses on comparative linguistics, syntax, pragmatics, and language revitalization, particularly in Sami languages. She has led projects funded by the Research Council of Norway and developed tools like the MacArthur-Bates CDI adapted to North Sami.

Her work emphasizes multilingualism, child language acquisition, and the interplay between syntax and information structure. Recent studies investigate Sami language transmission across generations and the role of parental language input. She teaches Nordic linguistics, multilingualism, and Sami languages at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, including speech therapy programs. Collaborations include projects on Arctic childhood development (SamBa) and North Germanic child language syntax.

Key contributions include publications on object shift in Scandinavian languages, North Sami word order variation, and bilingualism in Sami families. Her involvement in the DASAGO project (2011–2017) established a corpus of North Sami-speaking children and explored grammatical phenomena in Indigenous languages. She is currently pursuing a master's in speech therapy, aiming to bridge linguistics and clinical practice.

Professional activities include podcast appearances (e.g., NRK's Språksnakk) and advisory roles in language revitalization initiatives. Her research integrates theoretical syntax with sociolinguistic applications, addressing both academic and community-driven language preservation goals.