New honorary doctors at the Faculty of Languages

PhD Mandana Seyfeddinipur

Mandana Seyfeddinipur, born in 1967, is a linguist working at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Berlin. Her efforts in documenting and preserving endangered languages and making them accessible have been ground-breaking. As director of the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme (ELDP) and the Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR) for many years, she has been a driving force behind the development of scientific methods and international infrastructures for documenting languages. Her efforts have enabled the documentation of hundreds of languages around the world while creating open-access resources for research, education and the communities that still use and pass on the languages. She has thus strengthened international languages research as well as the conditions for cultural sustainability and human diversity.

Professor Emeritus Jeremy Smith

Jeremy Smith, born in 1955, is a British linguist and philologist. He was a professor at the University of Glasgow until his retirement in 2021 and president of the International Society for the Linguistics of English from 2018 to 2021. Smith is a world-leading researcher in the history of English, Scots and the book. He often applies interdisciplinary perspectives where the history of a language is situated in its socio-cultural context. Smith also unites linguistic and theological perspectives to shed new light on Modern English today. Through his interdisciplinary work, Smith has deepened our understanding of how social and cultural conditions shape and mark the development of languages. As a popular lecturer, he also brings linguistics research to a wider audience.

Professor Marit Westergaard

Marit Westergaard, born in 1956, is an internationally prominent linguist. As a professor at the Arctic University of Norway (UiT), she has conducted outstanding research on how children acquire languages when they grow up with one language and when they encounter more than one language at the same time. Her work has provided new and important insights into how grammar is formed and developed by speakers of different ages. Through studies of Nordic languages, in particular Norwegian dialects and Norwegian as a heritage language in the US, she has strengthened the impact of Nordic language research internationally. Marit Westergaard has also played a key role in building international research environments and collaborations, and is currently Secretary General of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.