Maria Khachaturyan

I am a postdoc at the Department of Cultures. My main descriptive focus is the Mano ethnic group and their language (400,000 speakers in Guinea and Liberia). I have been doing fieldwork among the Mano people since 2009. In 2015, I published a grammar of Mano. While continuing research on language as a system, I study the way language gets to reflect both historical background and ongoing dynamics of social interaction. My current project in linguistics focuses on the relationship between language contact and multilingualism through a detailed study of bilingual language acquisition. In my current project in linguistic anthropology I study the linguistic performance of the Mano Catholic community and the way the religious register was shaped by contact. I am also working on a comparative project focusing on language change fueled by Christianization and translation of ecclesiastic texts. The latter project is supported by a grant from the Fyssen foundation, France and by a grant from the Academy of Finland. My CV with pdfs of most publications can be found here.

I earned my PhD in Linguistics, summa cum laude, from INaLCO, Paris, France, in 2014, my MA in Sociology from Collège Universitaire Français, Moscow, Russia, in 2011, my MA and BA in Linguistics from Moscow State University, Moscow, Russia, in 2010. From 2015 to 2017 I was a postdoc at the Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley.