Anthropological Linguistics

Jun 1, 2025 · 1 min read
teaching

Description: This class provides an introduction to Anthropological linguistics, the study of human language in its social and cultural context. We examine theories on universalism and relativism and discuss their impact on the study of language with a focus on endangered languages. The course covers core concepts in anthropological linguistics such as kinship, politeness, color, and space. Further guiding questions concern the mechanisms by which culture might shape language, the universality of such processes and how much they can vary depending on context.

  • level: BA and MA
  • taught at: University of Bern
  • in: Spring 2025

⬇️ download the syllabus

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Sandra Auderset
Authors
Sandra Auderset (she/her)
Postdoctoral Researcher in Linguistics

I research how languages diversify over time and how we can trace and explain diversification. I work on tone and sound change, subgrouping, and person marking, with a focus on Mixtecan (Mexico). I combine quantitative methods and data-driven comparison with detailed analyses of individual varieties. To develop the empirical foundations needed, I conduct long-term fieldwork on Mixtec and Cuicatec varieties and develop openly available cross-linguistic resources.

I’m currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Bern. I have a PhD in Linguistics from the University of California, Santa Barbara (USA) and the Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig (Germany). My dissertation is a collection of three articles on Mixtec(an) language history using qualitative and quantitative methods.

News and updates:

  • I got a Firebird Research Grant for continuing the documentation of Santos Reyes Pápalo Cuicatec
  • November 2026: I will give a talk at the Transalpine Typology Meeting in Munich on Mixtec pronouns and classifiers
  • August 2026: Co-hosted a workshop on Microtypology at SLE with Linda Konnerth and Sergey Say
  • July 2026: I contributed to a position paper on language documentation infrastructure (/publication/gessler-2026-the-missing)
  • April 2026: New database paper out in Journal of Open Humanities Data