Institute for Advanced Study

IAS Distinguished Fellow Profile

Professor Michael Fortescue

IAS Distinguished Fellow 2004

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Professor of General Linguistics at the University of Copenhagen.  

Professor Fortescue's special area is Arctic languages, in which he has conducted field work in Greenland, Canada, Alaska and Siberia.  He is author of a comprehensive grammar of West Greenlandic (1984) and co-author of the Comparative Dictionary of Eskimo (1994); he is currently working on a similar dictionary of Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages.  He received his MA in Slavic languages and literatures at the University of California Berkeley (1970) and his PhD in Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh (1978).