Dr. Annemarie Verkerk granted tenure (permanent professorship)

Dr. Annemarie has been appointed to a professorship in ‘Language Science’ in the department Language Science and Technology, effective on 31 May 2026. Since 2019, she has been supported by a junior professorship at Saarland University through the WISNA programme. Prof. Verkerk’s areas of specialisation are linguistic typology and language evolution. Using statistical methods, the Dutch-born researcher examines differences and similarities between languages, taking into account both historical and sociolinguistic changes. Her work covers a wide range of topics, from negation, grammatical gender systems in Bantu languages, word order variation, applied information theory and number systems to typological universals. Her research group is currently building the Corpus of Indo-European Prose Plus (CIEP+), including a number of under-represented languages which are a particular concern to her. Prof. Annemarie Verkerk leads two DFG-funded projects, one within  SFB 1102 – Information Density and Linguistic Encoding (IDeaL) (until June 2026) and one in cooperation with the University of Aix-Marseille .  She and her colleagues publish in high-impact journals, most recently in NATURE Human Behaviour on the topic of linguistic universals.

We congratulate Annemarie Verkerk on her well-deserved tenure and look forward to upcoming joint projects!