Rarities in phonetics and phonology: Structural, typological, evolutionary, and social dimensions

Natalia Kuznetsova is an Assistant Professor of general linguistics at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan, Italy. She received her Candidate of Sciences title in Finno-Ugric languages from the Institute of Linguistic Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences, and her PhD in Digital Humanities from the Università degli Studi di Torino in Italy. Natalia primarily works on phonetics and phonology of endangered and lesser studied languages (Finnic, Guro, Akebu, Udihe, Tuvan, Azov Greek, Baltic etc.), on which she has conducted field studies in the course of more than 20 years. She also practices grammar and dictionary writing, explores phonological typology, language contacts, sociolinguistics, and has interests in the fields of cultural anthropology, populational genetics, and ethnobotany. Natalia has been an author or a co-author of over 50 scientific publications and a co-editor of five collected volumes in linguistics.

Cormac Anderson is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. He received his MA (Old and Middle Irish) from the University of Galway, Ireland, and his PhD (Linguistics) from Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. His doctoral work involved a reanalysis of Old Irish phonology within the context of the cross-linguistic typology of minimal vowel systems, while his postdoctoral work has mostly focused on coordinating a database of cognacy in the basic lexicon of Indo-European languages (https://iecor.clld.org/). He has an interest in the foundational problems of phonological typology, and has worked on developing tools for language comparison (e.g. https://clts.clld.org/). He has also conducted field studies in Celtic languages (e.g. https://soundcomparisons.com/Celtic/).

Shelece Easterday is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa in Honolulu, United States. She received both her MA and PhD in linguistics from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, United States. Her research takes a crosslinguistic approach to understanding the properties, emergence, and diachronic stability of rare and understudied sound patterns. She received the Joseph Greenberg Award from the Association for Linguistic Typology for her 2017 dissertation on highly complex syllable structure, which was reworked into a book published in 2019 through LangSci Press (https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/249). She has also worked in community-led indigenous language revitalization projects in New Mexico, and is currently involved in language documentation efforts in partnership with Micronesian diaspora communities in Hawaiʻi.