Project members

Karolin Obert is the Principal Investigator of the ERC-funded project Walk and Talk. She is also an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin and Associate Director of the Indigenous Languages Initiative at the Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies (UT Austin). Her research investigates how language reflects and shapes human experience within biophysical environments and sociocultural contexts. Karolin engages in long-term documentation of endangered languages of the Upper Rio Negro region in Brazilian Amazonia, working specifically with Dâw and Nadëb communities (Naduhup). Her work examines typological patterns and their historical and cultural underpinnings, focusing on two core themes: the linguistic encoding of space, place, and landscape, and the development of family-internal typological diversity. Integrating linguistic typology, sociocultural linguistics, historical linguistics, and linguistic anthropology, Karolin approaches language as a cultural resource and speech as a cultural practice.

Her research combines theoretical inquiry with extensive fieldwork, employing documentary methods such as audiovisual recording, semantic elicitation, and geospatial data collection in collaboration with Indigenous communities. Karolin’s studies reveal how spatial language interacts with cultural knowledge, mobility, and environmental features, offering insights into the lived realities of hunter-gatherer societies. She also investigates typological divergence in Nadëb to reconstruct historical contact networks and multilingual dynamics in pre-colonial and colonial Amazonia. Through interdisciplinary collaborations—including her ERC project and Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowship—Karolin advances comparative typologies of spatial language and contributes to language documentation efforts that support Indigenous rights and cultural continuity.

Alexandro Garcia-Laguia is a linguist specializing in the documentation and preservation of endangered languages, with research interests in how languages structure meaning and develop grammatical systems. He holds a PhD in Linguistics and, since 2012, has led the documentation of Northern Alta, an Austronesian language spoken by Negrito communities in the Philippines. This work has resulted in a comprehensive documentation corpus, a reference grammar, and a lexical database archived as the Northern Alta Language Documentation Corpus at the Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR).

Earlier in his academic training, he conducted fieldwork in Senegal and worked on Diola, a Niger-Congo language, as part of his master’s research. Alongside his primary work on endangered languages, he has broader interests in linguistic diversity and typology, as well as knowledge of Mandarin Chinese and a scholarly interest in Sinitic languages.

Niclas Burenhult received his Ph.D. in General Linguistics from Lund University in 2002. He is Associate Professor of General Linguistics at the Centre for Languages and Literature, and former Research Associate at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen. His research interests include the relationship between language, culture and cognition, semantic typology, language documentation and description, and linguistic prehistory, with particular focus on Southeast Asia. He has a particular interest in linguistic categorisation of landscape and was awarded a European Research Council Starting Grant in 2010 for the project 'Language, cognition and landscape (LACOLA)'. He is a leading expert on the Aslian languages, a group of Austroasiatic languages spoken in the Malay Peninsula, and he is a coordinator of the digital resource RWAAI. His research is currently funded by two grants from the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation.

Jens Larsson is a technician and software developer. He specializes in techniques of collection, management, and archiving of endangered languages data.