Education

• Ph.D. Cornell University, USA

Biography

Prof Anvita Abbi taught Linguistics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi for 38 years. Anvita Abbi has carried out first-hand field research and supervised research on all seven language families of India. Her recent work has been on the highly threatened languages of the Andaman Islands www.andamanese.net  She identified a new language family of India, namely Great Andamanese (2003), which was subsequently verified by the population genetic studies.

Prof. Abbi has recently been awarded the prestigious Kenneth Hale Award (2015) conferred by the Linguistic Society of America for outstanding lifetime contributions to the description and documentation of languages of India and the Padma Shri (2013) by the President of India for her pioneering work on endangered languages of India.

At present she is associated with SFU as a Visiting Professor of Indian Studies and occupies India Chair by the ICCR, India. Currently, she is teaching Field Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics.