Ghil'ad Zuckermann

Who is Ghil'ad Zuckermann?

Ghil'ad Zuckermann is an Israeli linguist who works with language revival, contact linguistics, lexicology and the study of language, culture and identity. Zuckermann is Professor of Linguistics and Endangered Languages at the University of Adelaide and holds an Australian Research Council Discovery Fellowship, as well as a Project 211 Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Shanghai International Studies University.

According to Zuckermann, "Israeli" is a Semito–European hybrid language, simultaneously based on Hebrew, Yiddish and other languages such as Russian and Polish. His multi-parental hybridization model is in contrast to both the traditional revival view and the relexification position. Zuckermann's approach to language revival weakens the family tree tool in historical linguistics.

His publications include the books Israelit Safa Yafa and Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Israeli Hebrew, the latter establishing a socio-philological framework for the analysis of camouflaged borrowing such as phono-semantic matching, and introducing a classification for "multisourced neologization". He has published academic articles in English, Hebrew, Italian, Yiddish, Spanish, German, Russian and Chinese.