LSA 2009

Jean-Marie Hombert holds a degree in computer engineering (INSA, Lyon), and a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley. He also has a "doctorat d'état" (doctorate) in linguistics from the University of Provence. From 1991 to 1996, Hombert was Dean of Research at Lyon2 University. He founded and directed the "Dynamique du Langage" Laboratory between 1994 and 2004. He has been the French coordinator for the European EUROCORES program "The Origin of Man, Language and Languages" since 2001. Between 2002 and 2005, he was the Director of the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences of the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). His research covers the fields of phonetics, African languages, historical linguistics and more recently Language origin and evolution. He recently organized a conference on New Directions in Historical Linguistics