Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies
Finland
fellow
Maria Khachaturyan
2022-2023
2023-2024
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