Rahel Tesfu Dires

I am a PhD candidate in Linguistics at the Department of Languages, University of Helsinki.

My current research aims at a morphological and typological analysis of grammatical number in Cushitic, an Afroasiatic language family. Specifically, I am looking at singulatives (derived noun forms denoting 'one' or 'a unit') in their grammatical number systems in several Cushitic languages.

My main area of interest includes languages spoken in the Horn of Africa. In my BA thesis, I analysed and collected loanwords from Italian, English and French into Amharic. During my MA studies, my interest in Afroasiatic languages increased: my thesis was a study on situatives in Somali and Amharic, through the innovative Constructive Adpositional Grammars (CxAdGrams) framework. 

My ongoing research is part of a broader project on singulatives, in which we are investigating not only their morphology but also their semantics and usage cross-linguistically. 

In Autumn 2021 I planned and co-taught a course about The Horn of Africa while this Winter I co-taught a master's course on Sociolinguistics. 

Last year I was awarded a Labex EFL mobility grant and spent three months at LLACAN (CNRS, Paris, France) working with Yvonne Treis.