Notes on Contributors
Contributors appear in alphabetical order.
Zhamilya Abik is a graduate of the MA program in the Eurasian Studies department at Nazarbayev University. Prior to her current research project on Dungan, she contributed to the Multimedia Corpus of Modern Spoken Kazakh Language project at Nazarbayev University. Zhamilya’s research interests include sociolinguistics, endangered languages, and the study of ethnolinguistic identity. Currently, she investigates the linguistic landscapes of Kazakhstan and the ethnolinguistic identity of the Gansu Dungans.
Giorgio Francesco Arcodia is professor of Chinese language and linguistics at the Department of Asian and North African Studies at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. His research on Sinitic languages has been published in numerous journals and in edited volumes. He is the author of Lexical Derivation in Mandarin Chinese (Crane Publishing, 2012) and, together with Bianca Basciano, co-author of Chinese Linguistics: An Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2021). His work primarly focuses on Chinese linguistics and linguistic typology, with particular attention to the areal typology of Sinitic languages, word formation processes, the expression of grammatical meaning, and the development of morphological structures.
Mithun Banerjee is a doctoral researcher in the Unit of General Linguistics, Department of Languages, Faculty of Arts, University of Helsinki, and an associate professor at the Department of Linguistics at the University of Dhaka. She is currently working on her doctoral project, a descriptive grammar of Mru. Her special interests include language description and linguistic field work with a specific focus on morphological description, morphosyntactic interface, language-based identity construction, and sociolinguistics. She has conducted her field work in Bangladesh, collaborating with Indigenous communities in Bangladesh to support their cultural and linguistic revitalization goals.
Lianqun Bao is a professor at the Faculty of Economics Oita University in Japan, where she teaches Chinese language, Asian culture and Regional studies. She specialises in multicultural and multilingual society studies. Her research interests focus on minority languages in northern China and has published several articles on Mongolic and Tungusic languages spoken in this area. In 2023, she received a JSPS KAKENHI (Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Research Results Publication) grant to publish two major works on Manchu and the Dörbed Mongolian Community Language. She is one of the editors for “Language Policy and Language Inheritance in Modern China” Series.
Kevin Chan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chinese Language and Literature and the Director of The Language Centre (Chinese Section) at Hong Kong Shue Yan University. His research interests include Cantonese grammar, historical linguistics, and linguistic typology. In 2016, he received The Vice-Chancellor’s Exemplary Teaching Award at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. In 2018, he was a finalist for the Young Linguist Award by Contemporary Linguistics.
Cuiping Cheng graduated from the School of Chinese Language and Literature, Zhejiang University in 2025. She specializes in syntax and semantics and works on topics like interrogatives and plurality. More specifically, she has conducted research on ‘yes-no’ questions and the semantic bias of specific particles found in Chinese Mandarin. She is originally from Anhui province and has worked on Chinese dialects of this region.
Bingcong Deng is a doctoral researcher in the Language and the Anthropocene research group at the Max Plank Institute of Geoanthropology in Jena, Germany. She obtained a BA in Chinese Language and Literature from Wuhan University, China and an MA in Chinese Linguistics from Leiden University, the Netherlands. Her current doctoral project aims to investigate the ancient lexical borrowings between Sino-Tibetan and Transeurasian. Using a multidisciplinary research methodology, her study aspires to contribute to the understanding of the cultural dynamic in prehistoric northern China.
Redouane Djamouri is a Director of Research at the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) and member of the CRLAO (Centre de Recherches Linguistiques sur l’Asie Orientale) in Paris. Much of his research focuses on the syntax and semantics of Archaic Chinese (Old Chinese), addressing topics such as demonstratives, word order, prepositions, and focus-marking. Over the past decade, he has broadened his research to include the study of language contact in China, particularly between Chinese and Altaic languages. Since 2008, he has conducted several field trips to Northwestern China, where he collected data on the Tangwang language, publishing several articles on his findings.
Sami Honkasalo is an Assistant Professor of the Japanese and Chinese languages in the Department of Languages at the University of Helsinki. With a background in the functional-typological approach to language and an emphasis on source materials collected through linguistic fieldwork, his research focuses on endangered minority languages of Eastern and Central Asia, such as Dungan and Gyalrongic. His publications cover topics from language contact to linguistic typology, and include A Grammar of Eastern Geshiza, which received the Pāṇini Award from the Association for Linguistic Typology in 2024.
Richard Kerbs is a postdoctoral researcher in the Unit of General Linguistics, Department of Languages, Faculty of Arts, University of Helsinki. His research interests include descriptive and documentary linguistics with a focus on Sino-Tibetan and Southeast Asian languages and cross-linguistic comparison and a special interest in topics such as tonology, multiverb constructions, information structure, and valency alternation strategies. He has conducted fieldwork in Northwestern China, resulting in a phonological description of the Gangou variety of Mandarin, as well as in Northern Thailand, materializing into his doctoral dissertation which is a reference grammar of Sgaw Karen.
Christine Lamarre is professor emerita at Inalco, where she had been teaching Chinese language and linguistics since 2009, after holding a professor position at the University of Tokyo. A member of the CRLAO (Centre de recherches linguistiques sur l’Asie Orientale), she specializes in morpho-syntactic variation within Sinitic languages and its typological significance, in the domains of modality, motion events, aspect and tense. She has conducted fieldwork in Northern China and published on Hebei and Shaanxi dialects. Some of her other publications exploit historical documents that reflect pre-modern and modern Chinese, including cen. 19th grammars and textbooks authored by missionaries.
Julie P.M. Lefort was a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre de recherches linguistiques sur l’Asie orientale (CRLAO) where she took part of the project ‘Language contact in Northern China—Historical and Typological perspectives’ (LCNC, Programme CE27, ANR 2018) for 2 years (2022–2024). She is now an Associate Professor at Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales, Paris. Her research focuses on Sino-Mongolian language contacts, especially in the southeast part of Gansu province involving the Dongxiang language and the two hybrid Chinese varieties of Linxia and Tangwang. She is particularly interested in contact-induced grammaticalization, descriptive linguistic fieldwork, and typology. She has conducted extensive fieldwork on the Dongxiang language, China and has published papers on different topics.
Xuping Li is a professor of Chinese linguistics at Zhejiang University, China. His research areas lie in formal linguistics and comparative syntax of Chinese languages and minority languages spoken in China. He has worked on languages like Wu Chinese, Gan-Qing Mandarin, Zhuang (Tai-Kadai), and Miao (Hmong-Mien). He specializes in the syntax and semantic composition of nominal phrases in East Asian languages in general, with a special interest in bare nouns, numerals, classifiers and demonstratives.
Ular Nurlan is a master’s student in the Linguistic Diversity and Digital Humanities program at the University of Helsinki. Her research interests include language contact, corpus linguistics, and linguistic typology, focusing on understudied languages in Central Asia, such as Dungan and the Kazakh variety spoken in China. Additionally, she has contributed to the collection, annotation, and analysis of linguistic data for the Multimedia Corpus of Modern Spoken Kazakh Language, a project hosted by Nazarbayev University.
Claire Saillard is a professor at the Department of Linguistics at the Université Paris Cité. Since 2009, Professor Saillard has been in charge of the curriculum in linguistics applied to the teaching of French as a foreign language (FLE), and has held various positions and responsibilities. She also teaches courses on Chinese linguistics and general linguistics with a focus on tense, aspect and modality. Her research interests include Chinese linguistics, Austronesian linguistics, foreign language acquisition, multilingualism and contact linguistics.
Erika Sandman is a researcher in the Unit of General Linguistics, Department of Languages, Faculty of Arts, University of Helsinki. She specializes in Northwest Sinitic contact varieties, descriptive linguistic fieldwork, and linguistic typology. Recently, she has extended her area of expertise into interactional linguistics. She has conducted extensive fieldwork on the Wutun language in Qinghai Province, China. Her previous publications include a reference grammar of Wutun, as well as papers on different grammatical topics such as word order, case marking, epistemic marking, nominalization, onomatopoeia, and numeral classifiers.
Na Song is currently a teaching fellow in Chinese language at Inalco (Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales) in Paris, where she earned her PhD in Linguistics in 2020. She previously taught general linguistics at the University of Tours and the University of Paris 8. Her research focuses on Baoding Mandarin and other Sinitic languages, including Southern Min, with a particular emphasis on morphosyntax and linguistic typology. Her work investigates topics in the verbal domain, such as sentence-final particles encoding tense, aspect, modality, and evidentiality (TAME), and negation, as well as in the nominal domain, including possession and classifier systems.
Pui Yiu Szeto is a lecturer in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Hong Kong. He also holds an adjunct professor position in the Department of Asian and North African Studies at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. His research sits at the intersection of language contact and linguistic typology, examining how languages influence each other at both the individual (bi/multilingual development) and societal levels. He is particularly interested in areal linguistics, contact-induced grammaticalization, and the ways in which linguistic and social factors shape the development of contact varieties, including pidgins and creoles. His primary focus lies in Sinitic languages and their neighboring languages.
Yasuhiro Yamakoshi Ph.D., Hokkaido University, is a professor of Linguistics on Mongolic languages at the Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. His main research fields are linguistic description and language documentation of Shinekhen Buryat and neighboring Mongolic languages spoken in northern China. The linguistic materials that are part of his publications are available online named Online Text of Mongolic Languages
Chingduang Yurayong is a researcher in the Unit of General Linguistics, Department of Languages, Faculty of Arts, University of Helsinki. He also acts as a visiting researcher at the Institute of Altaic Studies, Seoul National University and holds an adjunct professor position at the Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia, Mahidol University. His research interests focus on history, language use and contact, and areal typology of languages spoken across Eurasia, applying both descriptive and quantitative methods to examine linguistic diversity and cross-linguistic variation. This includes comparing typological profiles of individual languages and analyzing patterns in specific structural domains, such as predicative possession, demonstratives, definiteness and referentiality, information structure, stance and evaluation, word order, negation, quantification, and phonology.
Chenlei Zhou is an associate professor at the Institute of Linguistics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. His research interests encompass linguistic typology and language contact, with a particular emphasis on the Gansu-Qinghai linguistic area. Zhou’s research on the Gansu-Qinghai linguistic area primarily focuses on two aspects. First, he conducted an in-depth, single-site study of the Zhoutun dialect. Based on his five-month fieldwork, he authored a grammatical description of the Zhoutun dialect, which was published titled Zhoutun (2022) by Routledge. Additionally, he has written specialized studies on specific phenomena in the Zhoutun dialect. Second, Zhou has undertaken a broader investigation of language contact phenomena within the Gansu-Qinghai linguistic area. This mainly includes an examination of the aspect marking system.