ARIANA BANCU, PH.D
Linguist | Behavioral Scientist | Academic Coach
BIO
I am a linguist with a passion for language contact, endangered languages, and multilingualism. I obtained my Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Michigan in 2019, and I started working as an Assistant Professor at Northeastern Illinois University (NEIU) in Chicago shortly thereafter. I was affiliated with the Linguistics department, and the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality studies program, and I served as an instructional design specialist at NEIU.
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I dedicated several years to studying and documenting Transylvanian Saxon, an endangered Germanic language spoken in Romania and Germany. In that process, I managed my own lab and trained more than ten students to work with me as research assistants.
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My research interests are in the areas of:
Language Contact, Multilingualism, Language Variation, Grammatical and Phonological Transfer, and Documentation of Endangered Languages. I am a member of the Cognition, Convergence, Emergence Lab at the University of Michigan, where we explore research questions related to these areas in a collaborative and supportive environment.
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You can find my full CV here.
RESEARCH
My work over the past years has focused on analyzing and documenting Transylvanian Saxon, and endangered Germanic language originating in Romania. The speakers I work with are generally trilingual and speak German and Romanian as well. I currently run a research lab at NEIU dedicated to the study of language contact and language dominance effects in trilingual speakers. I train students to work with ELAN and Praat in order to transcribe and analyze sociolinguistic interview data. I work with data collected from Transylvanian Saxon speakers who also speak German and Romanian. We analyzed are currently working on assessing contact-induced phonological variation in Romanian under the influence of German and/or Transylvanian Saxon. You can find more details under the Trlingualism Lab tab.
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I am also collaborating with colleagues at the University of Michigan and Kyoto University on a historical linguistics project, documenting and analyzing category-specific coordinating conjunctions in Transylvanian Saxon. My most research project is a large-scale collaboration on a study about how Creoles are perceived and talked about within Creole-using communities and academic communities. Our results will be published later this year in a volume titled "Decolonizing Linguistics" (Oxford University Press).
Under the tabs below, you can find some of my already published work on Transylvanian Saxon and some of my conference presentations, or visit my profile on ResearchGate.