Matthias Urban received undergraduate and graduate training in linguistics at the University of Cologne and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. His postdoctoral work focused on the historical linguistics of the Central Andes and sought to investigate the use of different types of linguistic information –the areal distribution of linguistic features, place and personal names, substrate effects, other contact phenomena including lexical and grammatical borrowing, and the spread of language families–as windows to the prehistory of this culture area. He continues to pursue this approach, which also emphasizes the need to interpret the linguistic record against an interdisciplinary background, further as principal investigator of the Junior Research Group “The languages of the Central Andes”, funded by the German Research Foundation’s Emmy Noether Programme.

Position: Principal Investigator
Office: Rümelinstr. 23, Room 4.24
Email address: matthias.urban@uni-tuebingen.de
Telephone Number: +49-7071-29-74391
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=CcAwMF8AAAAJ&hl=de

Matthias Pache holds a doctorate degree in linguistics from Leiden University. He is a postdoctoral researcher in the Research Group “The Language Dynamics of the Ancient Central Andes” and focuses on the numerous, often unclassified languages of the Andean region in terms of language contact and linguistic prehistory. So far, Matthias Pache has carried out in-depth research on Quechuan, Aymaran, Lengua X and Mapudungun. He has also extensively investigated languages of Central America and northern South America: Chibchan, Pumé and Chocoan. He has published on a number of topics in descriptive linguistics, the historiography of Native American linguistics and typology. Moreover, his research has a major focus on historical linguistics, including the application of the comparative method in the context of Native South and Central American languages.

Position: Postdoctoral Researcher
Office: Rümelinstr. 23, room 425
Email address: matthias.pache@uni-tuebingen.de
Telephone Number: +49 7071 2976509

Nicholas Q. Emlen is a linguistic anthropologist who has conducted extensive ethnographic research on multilingualism, migration, and coffee production on the Andean-Amazonian agricultural frontier of Southern Peru. He also works on the reconstruction of Quechua-Aymara language contact in the ancient Central Andes. In another project, he uses 17th century texts to study multilingualism among Quechua, Aymara, Puquina, and Spanish in the colonial Andes, and he is currently involved in creating digital interfaces for those texts.

Position: Postdoctoral Researcher
Office: Rümelinstr. 23, room 425
Email address: nicholas.emlen@uni-tuebingen.de
Telephone Number: +49 7071 2976509
Personal Page: https://www.rug.nl/staff/n.q.emlen/

Hermann Sonntag started out as a philosopher studying Philosophy and Social Sciences at the University of Leipzig. Via his preoccupation with logic, semantics and language philosophy and his fateful encounter with Finnish, he chose linguistics as the major of his master studies. In his master’s thesis The Typology of Conditional Constructions: The Past-as-Irrealis Hypothesis in a Cross-linguistic Perspective he examined cross-linguistic similarities on the clause- and sentence-level. Now, as a member of Matthias Urban‘s junior research group The Language Dynamics of the Ancient Central Andes, his current dissertation project Lexical Evidence for the Pre-Columbian Trade and Exchange in Western South America tries to shed light on the linguistic and cultural situation in the Ancient Central Andes and beyond by looking into the relevant languages’ lexica for suspicious loan words. Furthermore, Hermann is interested in cross-linguistic grammaticalization paths and cyclic processes in language change, as well as in language complexity and the harnessing of resource-based approaches accounting for language structures and change.

Position: Doctoral Student
Office: Rümelinstr. 23, room 425
Email address: hermann.sonntag@uni-tuebingen.de
Telephone Number: +49 7071 2976509

Aviva Shimelman has a PhD in Linguistics from Université Laval and MA's in Political Science and Philosophy from The University of California, Berkeley and the Universidad National Autónoma de México, respectively. She taught linguistics and writing at the University of California at Santa Cruz, California State University at Monterey Bay and San Jose State University, as well as at Beijing Normal University in Zhuhai, China. She has worked in Latin America, principally in Yauyos, Peru, as an independent scholar with the support of the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts and in Melanesia, principally in Malakula, Vanuatu, as part of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History team there.

Luis Miguel Rojas-Berscia holds a PhD degree in linguistics from Radboud University Nijmegen/Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. He completed his MA degree in general linguistics at Radboud University and his licentiate degree in Hispanic Linguistics at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru. Currently, he is a postdoctoral research fellow within the Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language at the University of Queensland (Australia), and also works as lecturer at the Centre for Asian Studies from the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru. His work focuses on mapping language variation and change in numerous language families and isolates from South America, the Great Sandy Desert (Australia) and Taiwan under the lenses of his own research program dubbed "Dynamic Linguistics". For the past nine years, he has also focused on the documentation and description of Shawi, a Kawapanan language spoken in Peruvian north-western Amazonia.