Mena B. Lafkioui

Mena B. Lafkioui is a Full Professor (Directeur d’études) at the School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS), Paris, and a Research Director (Directeur de recherche) at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), affiliated with the LIER-FYT laboratory. Her research focuses on Berber linguistics, geolinguistics, sociolinguistics, Afroasiatic linguistics, Arabic dialectology, and negation typology.

Research and Academic Leadership

• Specializes in the interface between prosody-morphosyntax and information structure in linguistics.
• Active in computational linguistics, pragmatics, and typology, with extensive teaching experience at universities across Europe, the USA, and Africa.
• Supervised 10 Ph.D. students, 9 post-doctoral fellows, and advised 55 Master’s theses.

Honors and Professional Contributions

• Elected to the Accademia Ambrosiana (2014), including leadership roles in its Classe Africa and Section Berbero.
• Organized 17 international conferences, workshops, and panels, and served on editorial boards for journals like Dialectologia et Geolinguistica and Afrika Focus.
• Member of the Scientific Council for the Laboratoire d’excellence Empirical Foundations of Linguistics, Paris.