The Team

 Ioanna Sitaridou is Professor of Spanish and Historical Linguistics at the University of Cambridge where she also served as Head of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese from 2019-2021; Co-Director for the Cambridge Centre for Greek Studies; Fellow, Tutor and Director of Studies in Linguistics and Modern and Medieval Languages at Queens’ College, Cambridge; and Co-Editor-in-Chief for the linguistics journal Glossa Contact.

Prior to her Cambridge appointment in 2004 Prof. Ioanna Sitaridou worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Research Centre on Multilingualism at the University of Hamburg, investigating word order in Old Romance and the licensing/loss of null subjects in the history of French and Occitan (2002-2005), with Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Jürgen Meisel.

She received her PhD in Romance linguistics at the University of Manchester (2002) under the supervision of Prof. Nigel Vincent. She holds an MA in Linguistics from University College London (UCL) (1998). She also holds a BA in French Philology from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (1997), part of which was spent under the Erasmus scheme at the University of Lisbon (1997) studying Portuguese and Romance linguistics with Prof. Ana Maria Martins.

Her main areas of research are comparative and diachronic syntax of the Romance languages, in particular 13th Century Spanish, as well as dialectal Spanish, and dialectal Greek, especially Pontic Greek. The areas in which she carries out research are the relationship between syntactic change and acquisition, language contact and sociolinguistics, micro-variation and change, heritage languages and change, and phylogenies. She has published many papers in Glossa, Lingua, Diachronica, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, among others. She is known to take ‘orthodoxies’ and turn them upside-down thanks to meticulous consideration of data coupled with cutting-edge linguistic theory. She is one of the key advocates for a holistic approach to language contact incorporating findings from syntactic theory, variation, language acquisition and sociolinguistics and she has proposed that there is no need for a specialised theory of language contact. She has been awarded numerous fellowships at Princeton, Oslo, Harvard, UFB in Salvador, Brazil and CNRS-Inalco Paris. She has lectured all over the world delivering over 250 talks and lectures.

She has extensive experience field-working and researching endangered and low prestige languages in socio-politically sensitive contexts such as Romani-speaking communities in Dendropotamos, Thessaloniki; Vlach-speaking communities in Trikala; Spanish in La Palma, Canary Islands with the COSER team; and Llanito in Gibraltar. Undoubtedly, most of this experience has been gained out of 16 years of field working in Turkey where she took Romeyka out of oblivion (e.g., the Today programme in BBC Radio 4, The Independent, Der Spiegel, Sabah, etc.) and turned into a topic of global discussion by publishing papers in international peer-reviewed journals, while putting forward a new phylogeny of Greek positing the existence of more than one Greek language. She used this research and the resulting publicity to educate on bilingualism, promote linguistic self-esteem, especially for female speakers in remote/underprivileged areas, with the aim to promote heritage languages and cultures as a way of maintaining social cohesion in direct counterpoint to the ideology underpinning nationalism.