Looking for a master’s programme?

• Applications for the winter semester 2026/27 are now open!
• Master’s Programme “Linguistics: Language, Communication & Cognition”
  Our programme is interdisciplinary and organised collaboratively by the linguistic departments in Freiburg. Depending on the chosen specialisation, it can also be studied entirely in English.
  All information about the programme and available specialisations can be found here.

Questions or problems regarding the master’s programme?

News

• The lecture series Language, Communication & Cognition by the HPCL will continue in the winter term 2026/27. The speakers and their talks will be announced at the beginning of the term. You will find all talks and dates here.
• We are excited to share that Naomi Peck has successfully defended her PhD. Congratulations!
• A newspaper article in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (major national newspaper in Germany) about Kera’a featuring Prof. Dr. Uta Reinöhl: Wenn Fenster des Denkens erblinden (in German).
• Interview with Prof. Dr. Uta Reinöhl in Badische Zeitung (local newspaper) on endangered languages in connection with our exhibition Zur Sprache Kommen (in German). 
• Missed our exhibition at Uniseum? “Zur Sprache kommen: Forschung zu bedrohten Sprachen sichtbar gemacht” will now live on in the General Linguistics Department as a permanent exhibition! Visits via appointment only.

Current Publications

• Reinöhl, Uta and T. Mark Ellison (2026). “Recurrence plots – a tool for exploring repetition in un(der)studied language data”. Int J Digit Humanities. doi: 10.1007/s42803-026-00130-2.
• Reinöhl, Uta (2026). “More diachronic than you think: Historical depth within language documentation corpora and its potential to mitigate two major biases in linguistics”. In: Studies in Language Companion Series. Ed. by Sonja Riesberg, Uta Reinöhl, and Birgit Hellwig. Vol. 240. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, pp. 287–313. doi: 10.1075/slcs.240.12rei.
• Reinöhl, Uta and Naomi Peck (2026). “The ‘idea’ in the one-new-idea constraint“. Functions of Language (Online First). doi: 10.1075/fol.26012.rei.
• Reinöhl, Uta and Naomi Peck (2026). “How much is too much? The one-new-idea constraint and the information–intonation interface“. Functions of Language (Online First). doi: 10.1075/fol.25065.rei.
• Reinöhl, Uta and T. Mark Ellison (2026). “The one–new–idea constraint, functor–argument metaphors, and holistic speech processing”. Functions of Language (Online First). doi: 10.1075/fol.26015.rei.
• Reinöhl, Uta and Mark T. Ellison (2026). “The pivotal role of metaphor – word order routinization from proto- to modern language” In: The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 16th International Conference (EVOLANG XVI). Ed. by Stefan Hartmann, Marta Sibierska, Marlen Fröhlich, Yannick Jadoul, Mathilde Josserand, Theresa Matzinger, Katie Mudd, Jonas Nölle, Michael Pleyer, Sławomir Wacewicz, and Przemysław Żywiczyński (2026). Nijmegen: The Evolution of Language Conferences. doi: 10.17617/2.3696655.
• Riesberg, Sonja, Uta Reinöhl, and Birgit Hellwig, eds. (2026). The Documentarist Turn: From observable linguistic behaviour to typological generalizations. Vol. 240. Studies in Language Companion Series. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. doi: 10.1075/slcs.240.
• Hellwig, Birgit, Uta Reinöhl, Sonja Riesberg, Isabel Compes, Carmen Dawuda, Dagmar Jung, Felix Rau, Fritz Serzisko, Vera Szöllösi-Brenig, Katherine Walker, Helga Weyerts-Schweda, and Lena Wolberg (2026). “Nikolaus Himmelmann and the documentarist turn”. In: Studies in Language Companion Series. Ed. by Sonja Riesberg, Uta Reinöhl, and Birgit Hellwig. Vol. 240. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, pp. 1–26. doi: 10.1075/slcs.240.01hel.
• Reinöhl, Uta, Pachu Pulu, and Usha Wallner (2025). “A sketch grammar of Igu, the shamanic language of the Kera’a”. Himalayan Linguistics 24.1, pp. 58–87.
• Becker, Laura and Matías Guzmán Naranjo (2025). “Replication and methodological robustness in quantitative typology”. Linguistic Typology 29.3, pp. 463–505. doi: 10.1515/lingty-2023-0076.
• Guzmán Naranjo, Matías, Laura Becker, Miriam L. Schiele, and I-Ying Lin (2025). “Why modelling space is hard: no evidence for a serial founder effect in Polynesian phoneme inventories”. Linguistics 63.6, pp. 1493–1546. doi: 10.1515/ling-2024-0016.

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Contact

Sprachwissenschaftliches Seminar
Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg
Belfortstraße 18
79085 Freiburg im Breisgau

Telephone: 0761-203-3164
E‑Mail: verwaltung(at)linguistik.uni-freiburg.de
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