Henrik Liljegren has been promoted to professor in general linguistics
Henrik Liljegren has been promoted to professor in general linguistics with a focus on language documentation and language description.
Henrik Liljegren is a long-standing researcher and lecturer of the Department of Linguistics. He received his doctorate in 2008 after defending his doctoral thesis Towards a grammatical description of Palula: An Indo-Aryan language of the Hindu Kush.
Henrik Liljegren in Fayzabad, Afghanistan. Photo by Sani Marzban
Henrik Liljegren has since continued to explore the language situation in the Hindu Kush, the mountainous area that stretches from northeastern Afghanistan and northern Pakistan to Indian Kashmir. His research project Language contact and relatedness in the Hindu Kush region (2015–2020) systematically compared languages spoken in this distinctive and linguistically diverse region and one outcome of the project was the online database Hindu Kush Areal Typology. Since 2021, Henrik Liljegren leads a research project on the endangered language Gawarbati.
The decision to promote Henrik Liljegren to professor was made by the President of Stockholm University in March 2023.
In this project, we document Gawarbati, the little documented language of a vulnerable community in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border region. The aim is to compile an annotated audio and video corpus and a lexical database, to serve as a lasting record.
The project systematically compared languages spoken in this distinctive and linguistically diverse region. One tangible outcome of the project is the online database Hindu Kush Areal Typology.
