Søren Wichmann

Timeline

1. 1985–1996

   Degrees at Copenhagen

   He earns a BA in Comparative Literature at the University of Copenhagen in 1985 and an MA in the same field in 1992. In 1996, he completes a PhD in Native American Languages and Cultures at Copenhagen with a dissertation on Azoyú Tlapanec.

2. 1996–2015

   Roles at Copenhagen and Leipzig

   In 1996, he becomes an assistant professor in Copenhagen's Department of Native American Languages and Cultures. He is senior researcher at the Danish Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities from 2000 to 2001, visits Universidad de Sonora as a professor from 2001 to 2002 and in 2003, and serves as associate research professor in Copenhagen's Department of General and Applied Linguistics from 2002 to 2005. From 2003 to 2009, he is a postdoctoral fellow in Max Planck's Department of Linguistics; from 2009 to 2015, he is senior scientist there; he also serves as assistant professor in Leiden University's Languages and Cultures of Indian America from 2005 to 2008 and holds a postdoctoral fellowship at Leiden's Faculty of Archaeology from 2007 to 2011.

3. 2013

   An ASJP database release

   In 2013, he announces an ASJP release with 6,896 40-item word lists for 4,421 languages with distinct ISO 639-3 codes and many languages not recognized by that standard.

4. 2015–2022

   Academic posts in Europe and Asia

   From 2015 to 2017, he is an assistant professor at Leiden University's Centre for Linguistics, and from December 2015 to February 2016 he is a fellow at Tübingen's Center of Advanced Studies “Word, Bones, Genes, Tools”. He is a postdoctoral fellow in Tübingen's Department of Linguistics from June 2017 to January 2018, a researcher at Leiden's Centre for Linguistics from February 2018 to January 2021 and at Beijing Language University's Advanced Innovation Center for Language Resources from May 2018 to June 2020, then visits Tübingen as a professor from April 2021 to August 2021. He directs Kazan Federal University's Laboratory of Quantitative Linguistics from 2015 to March 2022.

5. 2021

   Testing homeland detection

   In 2021, he and Taraka Rama test six quantitative methods for locating language-family homelands by simulating branching language families, word lists and speaker populations moving in space.

6. 2025

   Fingerprinting conflict

   In 2025, he coauthors “Fingerprinting conflict: A comparative model with applications to archaeological and historical data” with colleagues whose affiliations include Kiel University. The paper presents a conflict model and demonstrates its comparative use in ten European cases spanning the Bronze Age to the 20th century.

7. 2025–2026

   Mapping place names

   In 2025, he and Lennart Chevallier publish “Mapping place names,” which uses the GeoNames database and an R software package called “toponym” to find patterns in place-name data. In March 2026, they receive the American Name Society's Best Article of the Year award for 2025.

8. Since 2021

   Group leader in ROOTS

   Since September 2021, he is group leader in the ROOTS Cluster of Excellence at Kiel University. Since 2025, he is topic editor for Lex – Danmarks Nationalleksikon. His research uses computational modeling of language dynamics and quantitative methods in historical linguistics and linguistic typology.