Sarah Babinski
- corpus phonetics - sound change - phylogenetics - Australian languages -

I am a phonetician and historical linguist working on questions of phonetic typology, stress/prosody, and sound change. Currently, I am a Visiting Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Boston College. 

I recently completed a postdoc at the Institute for the Interdisciplinary Study of Language Evolution (ISLE), University of Zürich. working on topics in phylolinguistics, including models of analogical change, population structure of phonetic data, and the performance of global phylogenies on rate inference.

I received my PhD from Yale University in 2022, with a dissertation titled "Archival Phonetics and Prosodic Typology in Sixteen Australian Languages." I have created word- and segment-level alignments for narrative recordings from 16 19 Australian languages from archival deposits in AIATSIS, ELAR, and PARADISEC. This phonetic corpus serves as the basis of much of my phonetic work, including a typology of stress marking in Australian languages, an investigation into the function of word-initial pitch, and studies of stress and prosody in individual languages. 

Creating a methodological pipeline for the processing of archival audio is essential to my corpus phonetic work. I have published on the use of forced alignment tools on under-resourced languages and on the usability of archival language materials for phonetic analysis. 

Research interests: 

• Language change 

• Typology & variation  

• Corpus phonetics 

• Computational methods 

• Prosody (especially word-level) 

• Analogy

• Australian language region