Jacob Menschel

Welcome to my website, and thank you for being interested in my research. I am a linguist from Germany currently based at the University of Cologne. My research interests include phonetics, phonology (especially prosody), wordhood, areal linguistics and language documentation and description. In my studies I focus on the languages of Northwestern Amazonia, particularly those of the Caquetá-Putumayo river basin. As a fieldworker I have worked with speakers of Andoke, an isolate, and with one of the last speakers of its Witotoan neighbor Nonuya. A detailed perspective on my research as well as a more comprehensive CV can be found below. 

In case you want to refresh your German and are interested in all things Amazonia, feel free to check out my blog here

Upcoming and recent...

• 18 April 2026: I presented a paper at the ISLA 2026 Isolated Languages Workshop at the University of Ghent: From genetic to areal isolation: Andoke and the People of the Center. 

• 14 - 16 Jan 2026: I presented a poster at the Old World Conference in Phonology, at the University of Cambridge:  Andoke word-level prosody: A preliminary view on a mixed stress / tone system. 

• 14 Nov 2025: I gave an invited talk at the Gesellschaft für Bedrohte Sprachen e.V. (GBS) Annual Member's Meeting in Freiburg. Thanks for the invitation!

• 26 - 29 Aug 2025: I presented two papers at the 58th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea, Bordeaux: Coca, Jaguar, and Beyond: The Dynamics of Shared Words in the Languages of Northwest Amazonia together with Patience Epps, and Katarzyna Wojtylak; Insights on the relation between Andoke and Urekena: Discovering linguistic history through comparative and ethnographic lenses (single-author)

• 04 - 06 Aug 2025: Mitologías de la Gente del Centro: ¿Lenguas distintas, historias compartidas?; presentation at SALSA XV (University of Helsinki)

• 03 - 05 June 2025: Reviewing the Andoke pre-auxiliary position: neither subject nor focus?; presentation at Emerging Topics in Typology 2025 (MPI-EVA, Leipzig)

• 02 June 2025: Das Deverbalisierungsmorphem kɤ̃= im Andoke (kolumbianischer Amazonas): Ein Beitrag zur Typologie ditropischer Klitika; presentation at Vielfaltslinguistik 2025, Universität Münster

• 26 May 2025: On the morphosyntax of Andoke ritual songs: A case study from the Colombian Amazon; presentation at Symposium on the Language of Ritual Discourse in South and Central America (Université Lyon 2 / CNRS, France)

• February 2025: I will be conducting fieldwork for four weeks jointly with the Andoke in Leticia, Colombia, funded by the Gesellschaft für bedrohte Sprachen e.V. (GBS) and the Cologne Center of Language Sciences (CCLS).

• 18 Dec 2024: The fox who went to eat avocado: On Andoke songs of abundance (Colombian Amazon); presentation at Discourse Studies colloquium (University of Cologne, Germany)

• 04 - 06 Dec 2024: Covert symmetrical diathesis alternations in Andoke (Northwestern Amazonia); online presentation at ALT XV (NTU, Singapore)

• 28 Nov 2024: Multimodal storytelling: A case study from Northwestern Amazonia; guest lecture at University of Cologne

• 19 Nov 2024: Two competing direction marking systems in cross-corporal perspective: A view from Andoke (Colombian Amazon); online presentation at workshop "From associated motion to associated posture in cross-linguistic perspective" (Universidad de Sonora, México)

• August 2024: Graduate classes on Andoke linguistic structure; in-person event organized jointly with Alejandro Correa, Lina Maria García (Instituo Caro y Cuervo, Bogotá, Colombia)

• July 2024: I have received a CCLS Junior travel grant with the proposal "The Language of the Axe: Exploring the structures of Andoke, an Amazonian isolate"