Johanna Nichols facts for kids

Johanna Nichols (born in 1945 in Iowa City, Iowa) is an American linguist. A linguist is a scientist who studies human language. She is a professor emerita, which means a retired professor, at the University of California, Berkeley. She taught in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures.

Studying Languages

She earned her Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1973. A Ph.D. is a very high university degree. Her special research project, called a dissertation, was about a grammar topic in Slavic languages. It looked at how language changes over time.

Johanna Nichols loves to study many different languages. Her research includes Slavic languages, like Russian. She also studies the very old history of languages in northern Eurasia. This helps us understand how languages developed over thousands of years. She also looks at how languages are built, which is called language typology. She has studied languages from the Caucasus region, especially Chechen and Ingush. She has made very important discoveries in these areas.

Awards and Recognition

People have honored Johanna Nichols for her amazing work. In 2013, a special book was published just for her. It was called Language Typology and Historical Contingency: In honor of Johanna Nichols.

Her most famous book is Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time. This book won a big award in 1994. It received the Leonard Bloomfield Book Award from the Linguistic Society of America.

In 2013, Johanna Nichols became a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America. This is a special honor for top linguists. In 2023, she was also chosen to be a member of the Academia Europaea. This is an important group of scientists and scholars from across Europe.

Books by Johanna Nichols

• Predicate Nominals: A Partial Surface Syntax of Russian. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981. ISBN: 0-520-09626-6.
• Grammar Inside and Outside the Clause: Some Approaches to Theory from the Field. Edited by Johanna Nichols and Anthony C. Woodbury. Cambridge [Cambridgeshire]; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985. ISBN: 0-521-26617-3.
• Evidentiality: The Linguistic Coding of Epistemology. Edited by Wallace Chafe and Johanna Nichols. Norwood, N.J.: Ablex Pub. Corp., 1986. ISBN: 0-89391-203-4
• Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. ISBN: 0-226-58056-3.
• Sound Symbolism. Edited by Leanne Hinton, Johanna Nichols, and John J. Ohala. Cambridge [England]; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1994. ISBN: 0-521-45219-8.
• Chechen–English and English–Chechen Dictionary / Noxchiin–ingals, ingals–noxchiin deshnizhaina. London; New York: Routledge Curzon, 2004. ISBN: 978-0-203-56517-9. Johanna Nichols, Ronald L. Sprouse, and Arbi Vagapov.
• Ingush Grammar. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. ISBN: 0-520-09877-3.

See also

In Spanish: Johanna Nichols para niños