Linguistic Typology
Experimental Research

Our working group conducts research on questions of typological language comparison and investigates less researched non-Indo-European languages, including the Mayan and Chibcha languages of Central America.

Experimental and corpus linguistic methods form the essential basis of the knowledge gained. The aim is to reduce the observed variation between languages to more abstract principles of the cognitive foundations of the language system.

Many speakers of different languages live in the urban area of Berlin. How can we support them in preserving their languages and promote contacts between language communities in Berlin and academics?

Berlin spricht!

Find out what languages are spoken in Berlin

explore the map

The online map documents the urban language diversity of the Berlin area interactively and dynamically.

find language projects

Berlin spricht! is a project that documents the linguistic diversity in the urban area of Berlin and support speakers of different languages.

get in contact

For questions about our projects or our websites and corpora, please write us an email.

10
+

languages

400
+

tokens

100
+

speakers

8
+

countries

Events

Find out about our events

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PARATAXE presentation – Berlin spricht!

2026 Feb 21

With two literary guests, we explore the current city map of linguistic diversity in Berlin

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Language Science Meets Linguistic Diversity

2026 Aug 31 – Sept 4

Five-day intensive training with hands-on practice, including homework assignments.

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Grammar in the Field: Languages of the Americas and Beyond

2025 July 4th

Talks on grammatical phenomena of languages of the Americas and beyond

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Argument/oblique alternations and variation

2025 June 26-28

Morphological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic variation in argument/oblique.

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Ergativity and Information Structure

2024 November 21-22

Discuss the relevant facts and shed light on analytical aspects of the relation between information structure and ergativity.