Dr. Martin Kohlberger

Biography

Martin Kohlberger is an Assistant Professor in the College of Arts and Science at the University of Saskatchewan. He specializes in Linguistics, with a focus on Chicham and Indigenous languages of the Americas. His research interests include language documentation, description, and contact, as well as areal typology, morphological and syntactic variation, and phonetics and phonology. Kohlberger has worked extensively in the foothills of the eastern Andes and the lowlands of the western Amazon basin, collaborating with the Shiwiar Nation to document their language, which is spoken in eastern Ecuador and northern Peru. He aims to understand linguistic structures by analyzing natural speech and uncovering the processes that shape language over time. His significant research priority is the documentation of endangered languages. In addition to his fieldwork, Kohlberger has taught various graduate and undergraduate courses in Phonetics and Phonology at institutions including Leiden University and the University of California, Davis. He holds a PhD in Linguistics obtained in 2020, focusing on the grammatical description of the Shiwiar language, and previously earned an MA (Honours) in Linguistics in 2010.

Research Interests