Ute Bohnacker

Ute Bohnacker is Professor of Linguistics at the Department of Linguistics & Philology and also a Reader in Scandinavian Languages. Her research expertise is mainly in first and second language acquisition, bilingualism, narrative, grammar and discourse, with a special interest in the Germanic languages. Her recent work has expanded towards language assessment and impaired populations and examines typical and atypical multilingual child language development in a Swedish context.

Ute Bohnacker is a Professor of Linguistics (since 2010) and a Reader in Scandinavian Languages (2006). Having grown up in Germany as a dialect speaker of Swabian, she studied languages and linguistics at Tübingen, London and Durham (UK), with a PhD thesis (1999) on the syntax and morphology of bilingual child Icelandic/English. Her research expertise is mainly in first and second language acquisition, bilingualism, narrative, grammar and discourse, with a special interest in the Germanic languages. She also has a long-standing experience in supervising graduate students and teaching general linguistics, Swedish linguistics and German.

Ute Bohnacker's work has expanded towards language assessment and impaired populations and examines typical and atypical multilingual child language development. She is currently directing a research project, BiLI-TAS, on bilingual preschool and primary-school children growing up with Turkish, Arabic, German and Swedish (Swedish Research Council 2014-2019, Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation 2020-). Bohnacker and her team are investigating vocabulary comprehension and production, phonological processing and narrative abilities in relation to age, language exposure and individual and environmental background factors. By building a knowledge base for age-related linguistic skills of bilingual children in Sweden, better, evidence-based, decisions can be made about what constitutes typical development and what should be considered a warning sign or clinical marker of language impairment (developmental language disorder) in multilingual children. The results are relevant for theoretical bilingualism as well as speech-language therapy and education.