Kathryn Franich
Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics
Director, Harvard PhonLab
Kathryn Franich is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics and director of the Harvard PhonLab. She specializes in languages of Africa, with a particular focus on the sound systems of Niger-Congo languages spoken in Cameroon and Nigeria. Her lab explores how language is structured, how it is used in communication, and how it gets passed on from one generation to the next, identifying factors which can contribute to endangerment of indigenous African languages. She also studies common threads between linguistic structure and music, with the goal of understanding how these systems of expression relate from a cognitive and evolutionary perspective.