Prof. Anvita Abbi
Professor of Linguistics,
Jawaharlal Nehru University
New Delhi 110067, India
Mo: 9810627835
Email: anvitaabbi@gmail.com
Born in the family of famous Hindi writers, she grew up to be a linguist devoting her time between teaching in the university and working on lesser known languages and tribal languages of India. She is a zealous field linguist, who has scanned through northern most tip of India, such as the areas represented by the Himalayan languages to the southern most tip, the areas represented by the languages of the Andaman Islands. She has, in last 30 years of a life of a linguist, worked on every language family of India, and wishes to unravel the linguistic typology of varied languages of India. An author of ten books and approximately 50 articles in various research journals, she was the Principal Investigator/Director of a mega project Vanishing Voices of the Great Andamanese, located at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.
She served as a Visiting Scientist in 2000 and 2003 at the Max Planck Institute, Leipzig, Germany and was nominated as a Distinguished Fellow of 2001 by the Language Typology Research Center, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. She has recently been nominated an honorary member of the Linguistic Society of America. At present she is one of the members of the Advisory Board of Terralingua, and advisor to UNESCO on language issues. She received the Rarashtriya Lokbhasha Samman 2003 for her contribution towards the tribal languages of India.
Currently she is the Guest Scientist at the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany.
