22 Facts About Ghil'ad Zuckermann

Ghil'ad Zuckermann is an Israeli-born language revivalist and linguist who works in contact linguistics, lexicology and the study of language, culture and identity.

Ghil'ad Zuckermann is the president of the Australian Association for Jewish Studies.

Ghil'ad Zuckermann was born in Tel Aviv in 1971 and raised in Eilat.

Ghil'ad Zuckermann is a polyglot, with his past teaching positions ranging across universities in England, China, Australia, Singapore, Slovakia, Israel, and the United States.

Ghil'ad Zuckermann was awarded a British Academy Research Grant, Memorial Foundation of Jewish Culture Postdoctoral Fellowship, Harold Hyam Wingate Scholarship and Chevening Scholarship.

Currently, Ghil'ad Zuckermann is Professor of Linguistics and Chair of Endangered Languages at the University of Adelaide.

Ghil'ad Zuckermann is elected member of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies and the Foundation for Endangered Languages.

Ghil'ad Zuckermann serves as Editorial Board member of the Journal of Language Contact, consultant for the Oxford English Dictionary, and expert witness in lexicography, linguistics and trademarks.

In 2017 Ghil'ad Zuckermann secured extensive research funding from Australia's National Health and Medical Research Council to study effects of Indigenous language reclamation on wellbeing.

Ghil'ad Zuckermann applies insights from the Hebrew revival to the revitalization of Aboriginal languages in Australia.

Ghil'ad Zuckermann proposes Native Tongue Title, compensation for language loss, because "linguicide" results in "loss of cultural autonomy, loss of spiritual and intellectual sovereignty, loss of soul".

Ghil'ad Zuckermann uses the term sleeping beauty to refer to a no-longer spoken language and urges Australia "to define the 330 Aboriginal languages, most of them sleeping beauties, as the official languages of their region", and to introduce bilingual signs and thus change the linguistic landscape of the country.

Ghil'ad Zuckermann proposes a controversial hybrid theory of the emergence of Israeli Hebrew according to which Hebrew and Yiddish "acted equally" as the "primary contributors" to Modern Hebrew.

Ghil'ad Zuckermann's response was published on 28 December 2004 in The Mendele Review: Yiddish Literature and Language.

Ghil'ad Zuckermann has tried to convince Eyre Peninsula principals to teach Barngarla at their schools.

Ghil'ad Zuckermann is the founder and convener of the Adelaide Language Festival.

Ghil'ad Zuckermann's research focuses on contact linguistics, lexicology, revivalistics, Jewish languages, and the study of language, culture and identity.

Ghil'ad Zuckermann argues that Israeli Hebrew, which he calls "Israeli", is a hybrid language that is genetically both Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic.

Ghil'ad Zuckermann suggests that "Israeli" is the continuation not only of literary Hebrew but of Yiddish, as well as Polish, Russian, German, English, Ladino, Arabic and other languages spoken by Hebrew revivalists.

Whereas Haugen categorizes borrowing into either substitution or importation, Ghil'ad Zuckermann explores cases of "simultaneous substitution and importation" in the form of camouflaged borrowing.

Ghil'ad Zuckermann proposes a new classification of multisourced neologisms such as phono-semantic matching.

Ghil'ad Zuckermann has published in English, Hebrew, Italian, Yiddish, Spanish, German, Russian, Arabic, Korean and Chinese.