Professor Dr. James Clackson

Biography

James Clackson has wide interests in the history of Latin and Greek languages, ancient sociolinguistics, bilingualism, languages, epigraphy, and comparative Indo-European studies. His particular interests include historical sociolinguistics of Latin, ancient languages of the Italian peninsula, especially Sabellian and Etruscan, and the history of the Armenian language. He is currently the Principal Investigator on an AHRC funded project titled ‘Greek Italy’. Clackson is also the editor of the oldest scholarly journal devoted to the general study of languages, the Transactions of the Philological Society. He supervises several current research projects, which include the study of how Greek expresses agent in passive verbs, a re-examination of the stop system in Indo-European using recent phonetic work, as well as exploration of dialects in the development of the Indo-European verbal system. Other areas of his research involve the interaction of Latin and Greek in Gaulish regions of Southern France, language from ancient curse tablets, the Oscan language of Southern Italy, and Sabine glosses on ancient texts. He investigates language use in Roman Britain, Latin borrowings from Punic, and studies focused on various Latin and Greek literary authors.

Research Interests

Experience