Matthias Brenzinger This is Me

Education

 Web References

1. 1. EOLSS article

   www.mercator-education.org/inf - [Cached]

   Published on: 11/18/1995   Last Visited: 6/23/2006

   Matthias Brenzinger Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asiaand Africa,
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   Brenzinger, Matthias (ed.) 1992 Language Death. Factual and Theoretical Explorations with Special Reference to East Africa. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter. [Collection of conference papers and review articles on endangered languages with a regional focus on eastern Africa]. De Graaf, Tjeerd 2004 The status of endangered languages in the border areas of Japan and Russia, in A. Argenter and R. McKenna Brown (eds.) On the Margins of Nations: Endangered languages and linguistic rights. Proceedings of the Eight Conference of the Foundation for Endangered Languages, Barcelona, 1-3 October 2004. Pp. 153-159. [Article on the situation of the Ainu and Nivkh languages in a series of conference proceedings on EL studies, published by the Foundation for Endangered Languages].
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   Matthias Brenzinger is a tenured researcher at the Institut fuer Afrikanistik, University of Cologne, Germany and currently (2005/2006) visiting professor at the Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa of the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. He organized several international conferences focusing on endangered languages and edited two volumes on language endangerment in Africa, i.e. Language Death. Factual and theoretical explorations with special reference to East Africa. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1992 and Endangered Languages in Africa. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe, 1998. Fieldwork and publications on endangered languages on the African continent were conducted among the Yaaku in Kenya, Ma'a in Tanzania, Bayso in Ethiopia, Khwe in Namibia, Botswana, Angola and Zambia. He supported communities' language maintenance activities, such as, the development of a practical orthography for Khwe and assisted as a consultant in the implementation of mother tongue education in Ethiopia. Since the mid-1990s he is involved in UNESCO activities and projects related to endangered language issues, for example together with Akira Yamamoto as chairperson of the UNESCO Ad-hoc Expert Group on Endangered Language. He is a member of the standing committee of WOCAL (World Congress of African Linguistics). e-mail: Matthias.Brenzinger@uni-koeln.de, Brenzinger@aa.tufs.ac.jp Tjeerd de Graaf, associate professor of phonetics at Groningen University (the Netherlands) until 2003, has specialized in the phonetic aspects of Ethnolinguistics for the last 15 years. In 1990, he joined a Japanese expedition and conducted his first fieldwork with the minority peoples of Sakhalin. Since then he has contributed to various research projects on the endangered languages of Russia. In co-operation with colleagues in the Russian Federation and Japan, he focused on the use of sound archives for research on minority languages and cultures. Most of these research projects were funded by special grants from the European Union and the Netherlands Organization of Scientific Research NWO. Tjeerd de Graaf received a Doctorate Honoris Causa for his work from the University of St.Petersburg in 1998. Since 2002, he has been a board member of the Foundation for Endangered Languages (Great Britain). He is a research fellow at the Frisian Academy, which co-ordinates research on European minorities, in particular the language, history and culture of Frisian, one of the lesser used languages of Europe. In 2003, he spent a semester as visiting professor at the University of St.Petersburg and in 2004 and 2005, he was guest researcher at the Slavic Research Center of Hokkaido University, Japan. e-mail: tdegraaf@fa.knaw.nl