Munich Center for Linguistics launched

To facilitate cross-disciplinary dialogue in linguistic research, LMU’s Faculty of Languages and Literature has launched the new Munich Center for Linguistics (MCL). “The center will provide a platform from which to establish new points of contact and widen our network, both within the faculty and with external research institutions with which we collaborate,” says Professor Lars Bülow, Chair of German Linguistic and a member of the Board of Directors at the MCL. “The aim is to more closely bundle linguistic expertise across the different areas of philology and encourage collaboration on issues that we have in common.”

Linguistic research at LMU has a distinctly interdisciplinary footprint. It accommodates a broad spectrum of languages and cultures both from the modern day and from past epochs. Current research is tackling issues such as the history and dialects of German, English and numerous Romance and Slavic languages; multilingualism in various regions of Europe, Asia, Central and South America; cognitive and machine-based natural language processing; and artificial intelligence applications.

This focus is equally reflected in the interdisciplinary make-up of the MCL’s Board of Directors. Alongside Bülow, the Board includes Barbara Sonnenhauser, Chair of Slavic Philology, Hans-Jörg Schmid, Chair of Modern English Linguistics, and Barbara Plank, Chair of Artificial Intelligence and Computational Linguistics. An important role will also be played by Professor James Kirby of the Institute for Phonetics and Speech Processing, whose research focuses on social robotics. The professorships of both Barbara Plank and James Kirby are funded under the aegis of the Hightech Agenda Bayern.