About
Umberto Ansaldo joined the School of Humanities, University of Hong Kong (HKU), in August 2009 as an Associate Professor in Linguistics. Previous to that, he taught and conducted research at the University of Amsterdam, the National University of Singapore and Stockholm University. His interests include the study of East-West linguistic encounters (contact languages of Asia), multilingual ecologies, language evolution and linguistic diversity. He specializes in Sinitic, Malay and isolating languages in general. For the past 5 years, Umberto has directed the project on the documentation of Sri Lanka Malay, the first documentation project to describe a ‘creole-like’ language, which resulted in a rich collection of linguistic and cultural material on creolization of language and culture, stored in the DoBeS archives (MPI Nijmegen – Volkswagen Stiftung). Since 2006, Umberto has shared the task of Series Editor of the Creole Language Library (John Benjamins)with Miriam Meyerhoff (University of Edinburgh), a series that specializes in the study of contact linguistics, pidgins and Creoles. As of last year, he started a new research project on the typology of Sinitic and Kwa languages under the auspices of the Dutch Scientific Foundation (NWO) in collaboration with Enoch Aboh (University of Amsterdam) and Lisa Cheng and Rint Sybesma (Leiden University); he is affiliated as a guest researcher at both Amsterdam (ACLC) and Leiden (LUCL). In Hong Kong, Umberto hopes to contribute to the growth of East Asian linguistics, contact linguistics and documentation of linguistic diversity in the region. Besides linguistics, he likes to practice martial arts, self-defense systems and yoga. He also loves to travel, eat and drink well, and read contemporary fiction.