Notes on Contributors
Willem F.H. Adelaar is Emeritus Professor of Amerindian Languages and Cultures at Leiden University in the Netherlands. He has conducted field research on different varieties of Quechua and on minor languages of the Andes. He has also worked on the genetic relations of South American languages of the Andes and the Amazonian region and has been involved in international activities addressing the issue of language endangerment. His further areas of expertise include linguistic reconstruction, contact and areal linguistics, oral literature and ethno-history of South American and Mesoamerican peoples, as well as the interface of linguistic studies with archaeological and historical research. His publications include Tarma Quechua (1977) and a comprehensive volume on the languages of the Andes (2004) of which he is the main author.
Astrid Alexander-Bakkerus is Master of Arts (French) and PhD in Comparative Linguistics, Amerindian Languages. She has published grammars of eighteenth century Amerindian languages (Cholón, Ecuadorian Quechua, Jebero/Xebero), papers regarding the phonology, morphology, nominalization, subordination and vocabulary of these languages, and papers in the field of Colonial and Missionary linguistics.
Justin Case is a doctoral candidate at the University of Ottawa, Canada. His linguistic interests are both descriptive and theoretical in nature and his work is fed by both field descriptions in the Ecuadorian Amazon and by historical corpora. He actively participates in research on missionary linguistic documentation and the work presented in this volume stems from research performed under the supervision of Dr. Otto Zwartjes at the University of Amsterdam.
Sabine Dedenbach-Salazar Sáenz is Senior Lecturer in Latin American and Amerindian Studies at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of Stirling (Scotland, United Kingdom). She obtained her PhD and Habilitation from the University of Bonn (Germany). Her research centres on the study of Amerindian languages, especially the (ethno)historical, anthropological and descriptive linguistics of Quechua. She analyses the translation of culture and the dynamics of religious change, above all in the context of the introduction of Christianity in the colonial era, and, in a wider framework, the clash of cultures and change of power-constellations it caused. See her academic website
Wolf Dietrich studied Romance and Classical Philology at the universities of Münster, Montpellier, and Tübingen. He wrote his PhD dissertation in 1971 (supervisor Eugenio Coseriu), working at the same time as Antonio Tovar’s assistant at the Institute of Indo-European Linguistics at Tübingen University. In 1970 he had made, together with A. Tovar, his first linguistic field research among the Western Guarani (Chiriguano) in Argentina. From 1973 to 2006 he was full professor of Romance linguistics at the University of Münster (Germany). One of his major projects was the Atlas Lingüístico Guaraní-Románico, together with Harald Thun (Kiel). His main interests are historical linguistics, syntax, semantics, and word formation, both in Romance and in Tupian languages.
Michael Dürr is an anthropological linguist specializing in Mesoamerica and in the North Pacific Rim. He works as a librarian in Berlin and also teaches anthropology and Mesoamerican languages at the Free University of Berlin. His publications, among others, include studies on the reconstruction of Proto-Mixtec tones, on the grammar of sixteenth-century K’iche’ and on texts for the languages Sm’algyax and Itelmen. Currently he focuses on the edition of sixteenth to eighteenth-century dictionaries and grammars in K’iche’ and Mixtec. See his website
Nicholas Q. Emlen is a linguistic anthropologist (PhD University of Michigan, 2014) who has conducted extensive ethnographic research on multilingualism, language contact, and coffee production on the Andean-Amazonian agricultural frontier of Southern Peru. He also works on the reconstruction of Quechua-Aymara language contact in the ancient Central Andes, and on multilingualism among Quechua, Aymara, Puquina, and Spanish in the colonial Andes. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the DFG Center for Advanced Studies “Words, Bones, Genes, Tools” (University of Tübingen), and at Leiden University Centre for Linguistics. His first book, Language, Coffee, and Migration on an Andean-Amazonian Frontier (University of Arizona Press), was published in 2020.
Rebeca Fernández Rodríguez is BA in Translation and Interpreting, and PhD in Linguistics by the University of Valladolid. She is currently lecturer at both the University of Amsterdam and Utrecht University in The Netherlands. She is the national coordinator for Masterlanguage Spanish and editor of ERLACS published by CEDLA. She is a member of the ROLD Research Group. She is currently editing the oldest bilingual dictionary of Ilocano. She is also interested in the circulation of knowledge between Europe-Asia-America.
Katja Hannß obtained her Master’s degree in Americanist Studies, Linguistics and Archaeology from Bonn University. She collaborated in a DobeS project (Dokumentation bedrohter Sprachen, Documentation of endangered languages) on the endangered Bolivian Chipaya language from 2005 to 2007 (Bonn University and University of Stirling, UK). She conducted her PhD project at the Radboud University in Nijmegen (the Netherlands) from where she obtained her doctoral degree in 2008. This was followed by further positions at the Universities of Constance, Regensburg and Munich. Since 2012 Hannß is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cologne where she conducted two projects on the Bolivian mixed and secret Kallawaya language. Her most recent project is concerned with salience-marking enclitics of Chipaya.
Simon van de Kerke was senior researcher at LUCL, Leiden Unversity, mainly focused on the languages of the southern Andes in Bolivia. He wrote his dissertation on the verbal morphology of Bolivian Quechua and worked on the highland language Chipaya. Currently retired, he continues to work on the description of the obsolete lowland Leko language and the dead highland Pukina language.
Pilar Máynez is doctor in Spanish Linguistics and professor at the National University of Mexico. Since many years she is engaged in Missionary Linguistics, especially in its development in New Spain in the sixteenth century. Pilar Máynez has written a number of books, including Fray Diego Durán: una interpretación de la cosmovisión mexica (UNAM, 1997) and El calepino de Sahagún. Un acercamiento (FCE/UNAM, 2003, 2015). She anchors the blog “Seminario Permanente de Historiografía Lingüística” (Colección de Historiografía Lingüística: Documentos y Estudios, 2019,
Arjan Mossel is PhD candidate in linguistics at Leiden University, with a research project focused on place-names and the linguistic past of the Central Andes. His interests include Andean languages and linguistics, as well as the application of GIS, databases, and information technology more broadly for research in the humanities.
Mercedes Montes de Oca is a researcher at the National University of Mexico. She has taught Classical Nahuatl for more than 30 years. Her primary field of study is colonial Nahuatl, mainly its semantic, discursive and pragmatic aspects. She has published several papers on the Nahuatl register used for evangelizing the Prehispanic people, as well as several chapters and a major book on Difrasismos, which is a salient lexical feature of ancient Mesoamerican discourses. Her other research interests are colonial Zapotec and the discursive aspects of Uto-Aztecan languages.
Andy Peetermans studied Classics and Italian at KU Leuven. His master’s thesis explored Varro’s, Cicero’s, and Quintilian’s views on linguistic normativity. A junior member of the KU Leuven project ‘Evolving views on the world’s languages in a globalizing world’, he is writing a PhD dissertation about early modern American missionary grammar titled ‘The Art of Transforming Traditions’. His research aims to clarify how grammarians’ strategies for dealing with the tension between the specificity of their object languages, on the one hand, and that of their principal model (Graeco-Latin tradition), on the other, give rise to different dynamic traditions of missionary grammar. He has also been involved in the teaching of introductory courses on Classical Greek linguistics at KU Leuven.
Julio Alfonso Pérez Luna completed his undergraduate and postgraduate studies in Classical Letters (classical philology) at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) between 1983 and 2002. Author of the book El inicio de la evangelización novohispana. La Obediencia (INAH, 2001), of the video documentary El inicio de la evangelización novohispana. Siglo XVI (INAH, 2016), various articles related to the process of evangelization of New Spain and coordination of books on linguistic historiography. He was a teacher at various institutions from 1988 to 2016. President of the Mexican Society of Linguistic Historiography from 2009 to 2012. Researcher at the Dirección de Lingüística of Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH) since 1994 and currently its holder.
María Alejandra Regúnaga is BA in Arts, and PhD in Linguistics by the Universidad Nacional del Sur (Bahía Blanca, Argentina). She is professor at the University of La Pampa in Argentina, and Director of the Linguistics Institute at the same institution. She is an Associate full-time researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) of Argentina. She is coordinator, together with Prof. Dr. Dioney Moreira Gomes (University of Brasilia), of Project 9 “Linguistic Diversity of America (Amerindian Languages)” of the Association of Linguistics and Philology of Latin America (ALFAL). She leads research projects on Patagonian Languages, and on Minority and Minoritized Languages. Her research is focused on the description of South Patagonian endangered/extinct languages, mainly Yahgan, through documentary and missionary sources.
Frauke Sachse is Program Director of Pre-Columbian Studies at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. Formerly assistant professor at the University of Bonn, Sachse holds a PhD in linguistics from Leiden University and an MA in anthropology, archaeology, and English from the University of Bonn. Her research interests concern the languages, linguistics, indigenous histories, and religions of Mesoamerica, with a current focus on aspects of translation and the hermeneutics of missionary and indigenous text sources from Highland Guatemala. Her research on the written heritage has been supported by fellowships from the Library of Congress, Dumbarton Oaks, and the Princeton University Library.
Matthias Urban is principal investigator of the Junior Research Group “The language dynamics of the ancient Central Andes”, hosted by the University of Tübingen and funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG)’s Emmy Noether Programme. Having held prior appointments at the universities of Leiden, Marburg, and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, his research interests include historical linguistics, in particular of the Andes, language contact, and linguistic typology.
Zanna Van Loon is a doctoral researcher in Early Modern History at KU Leuven. Her research interests include the history of book trade networks, missionary linguistics, book history, and the circulation of knowledge. She has published on the sixteenth-century Scottish book trade with printer-publisher Christopher Plantin. She is currently completing a doctoral project that deals with the early modern circulation of missionary knowledge on indigenous languages spoken in New Spain, Peru, and New France. As part of a broader multidisciplinary project “Evolving views on world’s languages in a globalizing world (1540–1840)”, her research particularly focuses on the acquisition, production, and diffusion processes of missionary knowledge on indigenous languages through grammars, dictionaries, and doctrinal translations.
Liesbeth Zack is assistant professor of Arabic language and culture at the University of Amsterdam. Her research interests include historical linguistics and Middle Arabic, Arabic dialectology, language change and sociolinguistics. She has published on the history of Egyptian Arabic, including an edition and study of Yūsuf al-Maġribī’s Dafʿ al-iṣr ʿan kalām ahl Miṣr (seventeenth century), one of the earliest descriptions of Egyptian Arabic. Currently she is preparing a grammar of nineteenth-century Cairene Arabic. She has co-edited Middle Arabic and Mixed Arabic: Diachrony and Synchrony (Brill, 2012).
Otto Zwartjes has published on Hispano-Arabic poetry (the kharjas) (Brill 1997, and with Henk Heijkoop, Brill 2004). He was full professor of Spanish language and linguistics at the University of Oslo where he was the leader of the “Oslo Project on Missionary Linguistics” (OsProMiL). He founded the research group Revitalising Older Linguistic Documentation (ROLD) at the University of Amsterdam. Currently he is full professor of Historical Linguistics of the Romance Languages, the History of Linguistics and Linguistic Typology at the Université de Paris (Laboratoire d’ Histoire des Théories Linguistiques). He has published extensively on Spanish, Portuguese and Latin missionary linguistics and coordinates since 2003 the International Conferences on Missionary Linguistics (with five volumes published by John Benjamins).