The Institute for the Interdisciplinary Study of Language Evolution

Management

The institute is managed by the Director of the Institute, Prof. Dr. Sabine Stoll e-mail
She is supported by the Head of Administration, Anke Benker e-mail

About

Since its foundation in 2014, the Institute for the Interdisciplinary Study of Language Evolution (ISLE Institute) has been dedicated to the comparative study of languages and their varieties with regard to language evolution and language processing and learning mechanisms.
Its focus is thereby on taking an overall evolutionary perspective, which draws on the thoroughly interdisciplinary approach taken by the former Center of Competency for the Interdisciplinary Study of Language Evolution (ISLE). This inter-faculty center of research was initiated and managed by the institute, jointly founded by the Faculty of Arts and Humanities and the Faculty of Science, and co-directed by Sabine Stoll, formerly Department of Comparative Language Science, and Marta Manser, Institute of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Sciences, succeeded by Carel van Schaik. The ISLE Center spearheaded close cooperations between researchers of various institutes at both faculties. Another milestone in the institute's research portfolio was marked by the successful acquisition of the National Center of Competence in Research/NCCR "Evolving Language" (Head Balthasar Bickel), which started in mid-2020 and is located at the ISLE Institute.

The institute's research is located within the triangle of glottogenesis (language origin), phylogeny (diachrony) and ontogeny (language acquisition). All areas are characterized by a comparative perspective (between species, between languages/populations, between language families). The mechanisms of temporal development and thus the factors that influence these mechanisms are also of central interest, with language contact research playing an important role. We set overarching global and temporal standards in collaboration with population genetics (humans and domesticated species) and geography.

The diachronic perspective of the ISLE Institute is strengthened by close cooperation between Indo-European studies, general linguistics and language acquisition research. This cooperation allows us to focus on the foundations and conditions for language change processes. The combination of qualitative analyses and modern quantitative methods, sought since the institute was founded, has revealed its enormous potential in these areas, which has already resulted in numerous publications and has been integrated into and expanded in further SNSF projects.

The institute offers instruction in the form of BA, MA and PhD programs in Comparative Linguistics, Evolutionary Language Science, Descriptive Linguistics, Psycholinguistics and Indo-European Linguistics.