Johanna Nichols (born 1945, Iowa City, Iowa)[1] is an American linguist and professor emerita in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley.
Johanna Nichols | |
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Born | 1945 (age 78–79) |
Occupation | Linguist |
Academic work | |
Main interests | Slavic languages, Northeast Caucasian languages, historical linguistics |
Notable works | Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time |
She earned her Ph.D. in Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1973 with a dissertation titled "The Balto-Slavic predicate instrumental: a problem in diachronic syntax".[2]
Her research interests include the Slavic languages, the linguistic prehistory of northern Eurasia, language typology, ancient linguistic prehistory, and languages of the Caucasus, chiefly Chechen and Ingush.[3] She has made fundamental contributions to these fields.[4]
A festschrift in her honor, Language Typology and Historical Contingency: In honor of Johanna Nichols, was published in 2013.[5]
Nichols's best known work, Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time, won the Linguistic Society of America's Leonard Bloomfield Book Award for 1994.[6]
In 2013 Nichols was inducted as a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America.[7] In 2023 she was elected as a member of the Academia Europaea.[8]