Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies
Finland
fellow
Maria Khachaturyan
Home institution
University of Helsinki
Country of origin (home institution)
Finland
Discipline(s)
Anthropology and ethnology
Interdisciplinary Studies
Language sciences and linguistics
Theme(s)
Cultural Studies
Fellowship dates
›
Biography
Maria Khachaturyan is an interdisciplinary researcher studying at the intersection of anthropology, sociolinguistics, and structural linguistics. Her research is underpinned by extensive fieldwork and focuses on cross-linguistic and cross-cultural comparison; her current project explores language contact between the under-studied Mano and Kpelle languages in West Africa in their social context. Khachaturyan initially trained as a linguist, but quickly expanded her area of expertise into sociology and anthropology as well. She received her PhD at Inalco, Paris in 2015 and spent three following years as a postdoc in the Department of Anthropology, UC Berkeley. She came to Helsinki in 2017 and until 2020 was a member of the Helsinki University Humanities Program.
Research Project
Bilingualism at home and in church: a holistic study of language contact in social contexts
Language contact and multilingualism have been driving language change throughout the human history. A common outcome of multilingualism is transfer of linguistic features from one language to another in the speech of multilingual individuals. Yet how exactly transferred features become, or do not become, a monolingual language norm remains poorly understood. A study of a multilingual West-African ecology proposed in Khachaturyan’s project, with Mano and Kpelle languages at its core, aims at filling this gap by looking at language contact through a dual lens: a close ethnographic study of the social context of contact and an analysis of its various linguistic consequences. Khachaturyan develops a methodologically innovative holistic program combining an investigation of individual and language-level processes, synchrony and diachrony, ethnography, corpus study and experiment.
Research Interests:
Multilingualism; language change; language and culture contact; conversion to Christianity; language socialization; language description and documentation