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Faculty Fellow

Lenore Grenoble

John Matthews Manly Distinguished Service Professor, Department of Linguistics University of Chicago

Biography

Photo by Erielle Bakkum

Lenore А. Grenoble is the John Matthews Manly Distinguished Service in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Chicago, specializing in Slavic and Arctic Indigenous languages. She also holds positions as an Adjunct Professor at Ilisimatusarfik (the University of Greenland) and as Director of the Arctic Linguistic Ecology Lab at the M.K. Ammosov North-Eastern Federal University in Yakutsk, Russia. Her research focuses on language contact and shift, vitality and sustainability, documentation and revitalization. Her primary fieldwork engages with speakers in far Northeastern Russia, Siberia, and Greenland. Grenoble is currently engaged in research that brings together linguistic, sociolinguistic, and psycholinguistic factors in contact-induced morphosyntactic change and shift, together with a study of the relationship of climate change, urbanization, language vitality, and well-being in Arctic Indigenous communities.

Featured Project

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Linguistic Futures: Language Shift and Revitalization in Rethinking (Socio)linguistic Theory

2025 – 2027

Projects

Emotion Construction Without a Sense of the Body

Emotion Construction Without a Sense of the Body

This project extended the investigation begun with the Language of Kim project to further explore how an individual with limited physical sensations perceives and expresses affect and emotion.
This project extended the research team’s investigation of Kim, a remarkable individual without somatosensation, from the restricted area of sensory experience into the broader and more momentous world of affect and emotion. The researchers were motivated by the finding that affect and emotion ...

Project Team:

The Language of Kim

The Language of Kim

Studying “Kim,” an individual with a radically limited sensory palate, researchers formalized a new method of understanding the link between linguistic encoding of sensory perception and actual perception.
This project adopted a field linguistic approach to interrogate the subjectivity of human experience in the absence of a typical sensory palate. The research, drawing on insights from neurobiology and linguistics, centered on a remarkable individual, Kim, whose sensory world is radically different ...

Project Team: