Professor Yaron Matras
Yaron Matras (Project co-ordinator) is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Manchester. He began studying Kurdish during his undergraduate degree at the University of Tübingen (Germany) in the mid-1980s. His MA thesis, submitted to the University of Hamburg in 1988, dealt with problems of codification and dialect variation in Kurmanji. He has since published several papers on ergativity in Kurmanji. Together with Geoffrey Haig, he organised the first international conference on Kurdish linguistics and co-edited a proceedings volume, which appeared in 2001. His other areas of research interest include contact linguistics, urban multilingualism, Romani, German dialects, and other languages of the Middle East.
For University of Manchester staff page see:
http://www.manchester.ac.uk/research/yaron.matras/personaldetails
For a selection of downloadable publications see:
http://languagecontact.humanities.manchester.ac.uk/YM/ym.html