Birgit Hellwig
Birgit Hellwig is Professor of Linguistics at the Department of Linguistics, University of Cologne (Germany), where she combines language documentation with psycholinguistics, exploring the possibilities, challenges and limitations of investigating language acquisition and socialization in diverse socio-cultural settings.
In 2014, she and her team started a major project on documenting the language used with and by Qaqet children in Papua New Guinea. Her interest in child language emerged out of a more general interest in documenting and analyzing languages from typological perspectives, and she continues to research diverse adult languages, including the Qaqet language, but also Goemai (a Chadic language of Nigeria), Katla (a Niger-Congo language of Sudan) and Tabaq (a Nilo-Saharan language of Sudan).
Hellwig studied African Linguistics at the Universities of Bayreuth and Hamburg (Germany) and she received her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Nijmegen (Netherlands) in 2003. Since then she has held positions at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) (London, UK), La Trobe University (Melbourne, Australia) and the University of Erfurt (Germany), before moving to the University of Cologne in 2014.
