Bio

I'm a linguist from Sweden (Uppsala-Stockholm), living in Leipzig in Germany. I am a interested in information, pragmatics, contact, evolution, diversification and linguistic methodology. Geographically I have mostly focussed on languages of the Pacific and West Africa. I work as a postdoctoral researcher at Dr Russell Gray's Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig.

PhD Thesis

I did my PhD at the Australian National University, submitting in 2020 and awarded the diploma in 2021. I was a part of a larger research project investigating the question of what it is that drives linguistic diversity called the Wellsprings of Linguistic Diversity. This project was lead by Prof. Nicholas Evans and funded by the Australian Research Council. For a longer description of our entire overarching research project, go here. 

My PhD thesis has four key chapters all related to language diversification in Oceania:

My PhD thesis is available for free here.

The citation is: 

Skirgård, H. (2021). Multilevel dynamics of language diversity in Oceania. PhD Dissertation. Canberra: Australian National University. DOI: 10.25911/WY2B-AQ30

Path

I grew up in Uppsala and moved to Stockholm as a teenager. I did my BA and MA in linguistics at Stockholm University (with an exchange at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg). I also worked in a research project in the Nijmegen for 1.5 years, at the Language and Cognition Department at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. I lived in Canberra for five years during my PhD programme, with some time spent in Neiafu, Sāmoa. I now live in Leipzig, Germany. It has been fun living in these places but also a struggle to leave them behind and start anew. I'm eternally grateful for the friends and family who have stuck with me.

Outreach

Besides doing research I'm also involved in public outreach, mostly through the podcast Because Language which I co-host together with the brilliant Daniel Midgley and quick-witted Ben Ainslie. I also do lectures on linguistic typology and similar topics to high school students, write blog posts, talk on radio etc. I write on a blog called Humans Who Read Grammars. It has been on a pause during the PhD, but may pick up again soon.

Apart from linguistics I am interested in computer games where you're not a person (Crusader Kings 3, Planet Zoo, City Skylines etc), music performance  and folk art.

Name pronunciation

I'm regularly asked how my name is pronounced, mainly by linguist colleagues but  also others. The pronounciation is basically how you'd pronounce the following words in English: "head" + "wig" + "she" + "god". 

If you're keen to be a bit more authentically swedish, try making a [v] instead of a [w]. For my continental germanic friends: the [g] is pronounced as in "dig", i.e.  not unvoiced ([k]) or fricativised ("Bach").

Swedish is a semi-tonal language, and we've got an unusual fricative ([ɧ]) and retroflexes ([ɖ]). These are the main challenges of my last name. I'm okay if you get it wrong, don't worry. Try for "head" + "wig" + "she" + "god" and it'll be fine. (Yes, it's fine to drop the first "r" in "Skirgård", it's teeny-tiny anyway and honestly often just dropped also by those of us who carry the name.)

Here is a transcription of my name in the International Phonetic Alphabet. 

Life partner