Dr Charlotte Hemmings

I am a post-doctoral researcher in the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics at the University of Oxford, and Linguistics Organising Tutor at Worcester College.

My research interests include language documentation and description; Austronesian linguistics; syntactic typology and information structure. I am currently working on the AHRC-funded project ‘Enggano in the Austronesian family: Historical and typological perspectives’. The project aims to document and describe the Enggano language, spoken by roughly 1,500 speakers on Enggano Island off the South Coast of Sumatra. It will result in a collection of audio & video recordings of Enggano, a descriptive grammar of the language, historical and typological comparison with other Austronesian languages, and literacy materials for the Enggano community.

My previous research focused on the languages of Northern Sarawak in Malaysian Borneo. From 2016-2019, I held a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of Oxford, researching ‘Information Structure in the Languages of Northern Sarawak’. The project combined documentation of three languages, Kelabit, Lun Bawang and Sa’ban, with analysis of the role that information structure plays in determining syntactic choices. This built on PhD research into the Kelabit language, which sought to establish parameters of variation within Western Austronesian and the implications that these have for ongoing theoretical and historical debates.