Jessica Kantarovich

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the Ohio State University, with an appointment in the Global Arts and Humanities Discovery Theme. I am also Collaborative Faculty in American Indian Studies. I specialize in language contact, change, and variation, with a particular focus on language ecologies of the Arctic and language endangerment and shift in Siberia. Since 2022, I have also been conducting fieldwork on Kalaallisut (West Greenlandic) in Greenland.

I received my PhD from the University of Chicago in 2020, with a dissertation on ongoing morphosyntactic change in Chukchi. My overarching research interest is developing a typology of languages in situations of unstable multilingualism and shift, including endangered languages, heritage languages, and contact varieties. My work integrates approaches from contact linguistics, sociolinguistics, experimental psycholinguistics, and formal syntactic theory.

My work has been funded by the National Science Foundation (BCS-1761551), a Russian Mega-grant (2020-220-08-6030), the Mellon Foundation, and the University of Chicago Humanities Division.

May/June 2024: I am organizing a panel on "Language structure and language use in a changing Arctic" at ICASS 2024 (part of the Arctic Congress) in Bodø, Norway.

May 2024: I am presenting on "Identity construction in the language endangerment setting" at the LIIA (Language Ideologies and Inequality in the Arctic) conference at Ilisimatusarfik in Nuuk, Greenland.

January 2024: I will be presenting my talk, "Morphosyntactic reconfiguration among younger speakers of Kalaallisut (West Greenlandic)," at the LSA Annual Meeting in NY.

August 2023: I recently started a tenure-track position at the Ohio State University in the Department of Linguistics.

UChicago News article about my work in Greenland ("From Israeli digs to Greenland villages, UChicagoans travel the world for research", Sept. 19, 2023)