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Romanisches Seminar
Siegelement der Uni Freiburg in Form eines Kleeblatts

Prof. Dr. Stefan Pfänder

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Exploring Language at Its Limits

Linguist Stefan Pfänder studies what happens when language reaches its edges — when words falter, mix, or are only partly available. His research turns everyday moments of struggle and creativity in communication into windows on how humans make meaning together.

Pfänder works with video recordings of real-life interactions: early-stage language learners finding their voice, multilingual conversations on city streets, parents communicating with their infants, intercultural couples navigating emotional talks, or people with Alzheimer’s disease and trauma patients in therapy. What links these very different encounters is his conviction that language is not just words — it is embodied action. Facial expressions, gestures, posture, and movement all carry meaning.

His team uses video-based interaction analysis, multimodal annotation, and long-term conversation studies to understand how people coordinate talk, gesture, rhythm, and space. These fine-grained observations are combined with quantitative analyses and visual tools that make patterns visible and teachable — from the timing of speaker changes to prosodic contours and spatial organisation. The work spans twelve languages, from Romance and Germanic ones to Russian, Creoles, Quechua, Wolof, and Egyptian Arabic.

Pfänder’s group builds and analyses multimodal corpora — vast video and audio archives — linking close qualitative observation with computational modelling and experimental research. Collaborations with computer and information scientists have led to new ways of capturing and visualising interaction, helping to show how even fleeting gestures or pauses contribute to understanding.

At the heart of his approach lies one idea: language is a social, embodied practice. This means that ways of communicating often dismissed as “deficient” — limited vocabularies, emotional outbursts, conversations between strangers, or speech loss due to illness — are, in fact, central to what makes us communicative beings.

Pfänder’s books reflect this shift. Gramática mestiza (on Spanish-based contact languages in the Andes) treats linguistic mixture not as corruption but as a source of creativity. Le français cosmopolite (on francophone North Africa) challenges the idea of “pure” French and shows colonial varieties as natural developments. Wiedererzählen als kulturelle Praxis explores storytelling as a shared, multimodal art in everyday life, therapy, and performance. His work on Creole languages (Innovation and Inheritance) similarly moves beyond deficit models to understand linguistic change as innovation.

chevron-right DFG/SNF-funded project Emergentes Erinnern

His projects, supported by long-term funding in Germany and Switzerland, range from Shoah testimony archives to psychotherapy sessions and ecological corpora of spoken French and Spanish. Across all of them, Pfänder emphasises open data, transparent methodology, and the link between detailed observation, measurement, and visualisation.

Accessibility is central to his research and teaching. His team publishes life stories from underrepresented groups and studies signed and atypical communication — including Lengua de Signos, American Sign Language, Pidgin Signed English, and interactions involving aphasia, stuttering, dementia, or trauma. Their findings inform teacher training, inclusive education, and communication policy in media and justice systems.

Pfänder is also on the board of the Freiburg Digital Humanities Lab, which promotes open, reproducible research and responsible digitisation of sensitive language data. Many of his former students now apply this work to social challenges — from intercultural and intergenerational understanding to accessibility and fairness in communication.

In all of this, Stefan Pfänder’s research reminds us that language is not only spoken — it is lived, embodied, and shared.