We would like to wish a warm welcome to Dr. Alexander Andrason, whose new position at Living Tongues Institute is Coordinator for Documentation in Africa. Andrason has contributed to the description and visibility of under-researched and minority languages in Tanzania (Arusa and Hadza), Zimbabwe (Tjwao), Gambia (Mandinka), and Nigeria (Dza and Mingang Doso). He is currently based in Ghana.

A global nomad, Andrason was brought up in a multilingual environment and has resided in nine European and African countries. A hyper-multilingual whose language repertoire draws on forty languages (ten of which he speaks with native or native-like proficiency), he is a pluri-disciplinary scholar who thrives at disciplines and theories’ crossroads. Andrason is an idealist who fights for the preservation and revitalization of ethnic, cultural, and language minorities.

Andrason holds three doctoral degrees: PhD in Semitic Languages (University Complutense in Madrid), PhD in African Languages (Stellenbosch University), and PhD in General Linguistics (University of Iceland). The scope of his research is broad and includes the areas of linguistics, cognitive science, complexity theory, anthropology, pedagogy, and philosophy. He specializes in (cognitive) linguistics, and its various sub-types, especially, semantics and morphosyntax, sociolinguistics and language contact, typology and grammaticalization theory, language documentation, human-to-animal communication, as well as the so-called “peripheral” grammatical phenomenon such as interjections, onomatopoeias, ideophones, and conative animal calls.

His interests include the Indo-European (Germanic, Slavic, Romance, and Greek), Afro-Asiatic (Semitic, Egyptian, and Chadic) and Niger-Congo (Mande, Adamawa, Kwa, Bantu) families, as well as Nilotic (Maa), Khoe-Kwadi (Eastern Kalahari), and Turkic (Oghuz Turkic) languages. Since 2006, he has been engaged in the documentation and preservation of Wymysorys, a nearly extinct Germanic language spoken in Poland.

Andrason’s latest publication is: Ideophones in Arusa Maasai: Syntax, morphology, and phonetics (now available for free download).