Birgit Hellwig

Birgit Hellwig is a German linguist specializing in African and Papuan languages. She is professor of general linguistics at the University of Cologne.

Education Hellwig studied African linguistics at the University of Bayreuth and the University of Hamburg. In 1998 she took up a doctoral position at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, where her doctorate was awarded in 2001. A major focus of her research has been creating corpora for all of the above languages, based on original fieldwork. the Australian Research Council, the German Research Foundation, and the Volkswagen Foundation.

Awards and honours In 2020, Hellwig was elected ordinary member of the Academia Europaea.

Selected publications Hellwig, Birgit. 2006. Serial verb constructions in Goemai. In Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald & R. M. W. Dixon (eds.), Serial verb constructions: a cross-linguistic typology, 88–107. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hellwig, Birgit. 2006. Field semantics and grammar-writing: stimuli-based techniques and the study of locative verbs. In Felix K. Ameka, Alan Dench & Nicholas Evans (eds.), Catching language: the standing challenge of grammar-writing, 321–358. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Hellwig, Birgit. 2010. Meaning and translation in linguistic fieldwork. Studies in Language 34 (4), 802–831. Hellwig, Birgit. 2011. A grammar of Goemai. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Hellwig, Birgit. 2019. A grammar of Qaqet. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.