Victor Friedman

Professor
portrait

Victor Friedman
Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Balkan and Slavic Linguistics
Director of CEERES

Wieboldt 405
On leave 2008-09
(773) 702-0732
vfriedm@uchicago.edu

CV (PDF)
More information available at: http://home.uchicago.edu/~vfriedm/

Victor A. Friedman (Ph.D., University of Chicago, 1975) is Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago, where he also holds an appointment in the Department of Linguistics and an associate appointment in the Department of Anthropology. He is also Director of the Center for East European and Russian/Eurasian Studies, a National Resource Center at Chicago. He is president of the U.S. National Committee of the International Association for Southeast European Studies and vice-president of the U.S. National Committee of the International Committee of Slavists. Professor Friedman is a member of the Macedonian Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Academy of Sciences of Albania, the Academy of Arts and Sciences of Kosova, Matica Srpska, and has been awarded the "1300 Years of Bulgaria" jubilee medal. He has thrice been awarded the Golden Plaque from Sts. Cyril and Methodius University of Skopje, from which he also holds the degree of Doctor Honoris Causa. In 2009 he received the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages’ Annual Award for Outstanding Contributions to Scholarship. During the Yugoslav Wars of Succession he worked for the United Nations as a senior policy and political analyst in Macedonia and consulted for other international organizations. He has held Guggenheim, Fulbright-Hays, ACLS, IREX, NEH, and other fellowships. His publications include The Grammatical Categories of the Macedonian Indicative (1977), Linguistic Emblems and Emblematic Languages: On Language as Flag in the Balkans (1999), Turkish in Macedonia and Beyond (2003), Studies in Albanian and Other Balkan Languages (2004, a nominee for Tirana’s Institute of Albanology’s Çmimi i albanologjisë [prize for Albanology]), a scholarly edition of Aleko Konstantinov’s Bai Ganyo (2010, winner of the Bulgarian Studies Association John D. Bell Book Award), Očerki lakskogo jazyka [Russian: Studies in Lak Grammar] (2011), as well as more than 200 scholarly articles. His main research interests are grammatical categories as well as sociolinguistic issues related to contact phenomena, standardization, ideology, and identity in the languages of the Balkans and the Caucasus.

Selected Publications

“Albanian in the Balkan Linguistic League: A Reconsideration of Theoretical Implications.” Studia Albanica Vol. 28, No. 1. 2005 .33-44.

“The Balkans as a Linguistic Area.” Elsevier Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics , Vol. 1, ed.-in-Chief Keith Brown. Oxford: Elsevier. 2006. 657-672.

  “Lak.” Elsevier Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics , Vol. 6, ed.-in-Chief Keith Brown. Oxford: Elsevier. 2006. 303-305.

“Macedonia: Language Situation.” Elsevier Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics , Vol. 7, ed.-in-Chief Keith Brown. Oxford: Elsevier. 2006. 354-356.

“Macedonian.” Elsevier Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics , Vol. 7, ed.-in-Chief Keith Brown. Oxford: Elsevier. 2006. 356-357.

“Lak Folktales: Materials for a Bilingual Reader: Part One. Who Is most Important?” The Bill Question: Studies in Honor of Bill J. Darden on the Occasion of His Sixty-Sixth Birthday , ed. by D. Dyer, G. Fowler, V. Friedman, D. Hristova, H. Aronson, and J. Sadock. Bloomington, IN: Slavica. 2006. 111-116

“Albania. Sociolinguistics: An International Handbook of the Science of Language and Society , Vol. 3, 2nd ed., ed. by U. Ammon, N. Dittmar, K.J. Matthier, P. Trudgill. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. 2006. 1874-1882.

“Boundaries and Borders in Balkan Slavic.” International Journal of Slavic Linguistics and Poetics . Vol. 44-45. 2002-2003 (published 2006). 161-173.

“Codeswitching in Albanian Urban Music”. Urban Music in the Balkans: Drop-Out Ethnic Identitites or a Case of Tolerance and Global Thinking? , ed. by Sokol Shupo. Tirana: ASMUS. 2006. 540-564.

“West Rumelian Turkish in Macedonia and Adjacent Areas.” Turkic Language Contacts , ed. by H. Boeschoten and L. Johanson. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. 2006. 27-45.

“Dialectological Perspectives on Romani in the Balkan Linguistic League.” Balkansko ezikoznanie - Linguistique balkanique . Vol. 45, No. 1, 2006. 45-54.

“Codeswitching in Urbaner Balkanmuzik.” Zeitschrift der Initiative Minderheiten. No. 61, 2006. 14-15 (German précis of #211).

“The Expression of Speaker Subjectivity in Lak.” L'Énonciation médiatisée II, ed. by Zlatka Guentchéva. Louvain: Peeters. 2007. 351-376.

“Balkanizing the Balkan sprachbund: A closer look at grammatical permeability and feature distribution.” Grammars in Contact: A Cross Linguistic Typology , ed. by A. Aikhenvald and R.F.W. Dixon. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2007. 201-219.

“Makedonstika vo SAD (Macedonian: Macedonian Studies in the USA).” 40 godini me_unaroden Seminar za makedonski jazik, literatura i kultura: 1967-2007 , ed. by Emilija Crvenkovska. Skopje: University of Skopje. 2007. 55-58.

“Targeted Testing: Where Grammar Meets Proficiency and Authentic Content.” Glossos , Vol 9. 2007. 5 pp. http://www.seelrc.org/glossos/issues/9/friedman.pdf

“Language Politics and Language Policies in the Contemporary Western Balkans: Infinitives, Turkisms, and EUrolinguistics.” EES News: East European Studies - Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars . September-October 2007, 1-4, 10-11.

“Udvojuvanjeto na objektot vo balkanskite jazici vo minatoto i denes (Macedonian: Object reduplication in Balkan languages in the past and today).” Klasika - Balkanistika - Paleoslavistika: Festschrift in honor of the 85th birthday and 60th anniversary of scholarly activity of Acad. Petar Ilievski , ed. by Zuzana Topoli_ska et al., Skopje: Macedonian Academy of Arts and Sciences. 2007. 235-249.

“Balkan Linguistics and the Challenges of EU Integration: Minorities as Majorities and Majorities as Minorities.” Dynamics of National Identity and Transnational Identities in the Process of European Integration , Ed. by Elena Marushiakova, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 2008. 362-375. (also to be published in Bulgarian Sofia: BAN).

“Macedonian Dialectology and Eurology: Areal and Typological Perspectives.” Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung Vol. 61, No. 2 139-146.

“Language Contact in Southeastern Europe: From Tolerance to Conflict and Back Again.” Köptildilik: Til-Sana-Medeniet [Polylingualism: Language-Consciousness-Culture] , Eleventh International Conference "Axanovskie _tenija", al-Farabi Kazakh National Unversity, ed. by E. D. Sulejmenova et al., Almaty: al-Farabi Kazakh National Unversity, 2008. 18-31.

Courses:

History of Albania
Structure of Albanian
Albanian Dialectology
Albanian Language and Linguistics
Advanced Albanian Language and Linguistics
History of Bulgarian
Structure of Bulgarian
Bulgarian for Reading Knowledge
Structure of Lak
Lak Language and Linguistics
Lak Morphonemic & Syntactic Analysis
Macedonian for Slavists
Structure of Macedonian
Macedonian Language and Linguistics
Advanced Macedonian Language and Linguistics
Intensive Structure of Macedonian
Old Church Slavonic
Romani Language and Linguistics
Comparative East South Slavic Linguistics
Comparative South Slavic
Language, Power and Identity In Southeast Europe
Language Contact: The Balkan Connection