top of page

CV

Konrad Rybka
 

Born in Warsaw, PL

Lives & works in Amsterdam, NL

k.a.rybka@uva.nl

Education

 

2011—2015 Ph.D. project supervised by Drs. P.C. Hengeveld, E.B. Carlin and E.O. Aboh at the University of Amsterdam, titled: When ‘what’

and ‘where’ fall into place: Lokono ontology of landscape terms, funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research.

2008—2010 Research Master in Linguistics (graduated with Honors) at the University of Amsterdam. Thesis: The semantics and

morphosyntax of topological relators in Lokono.

2006—2007 General Linguistics Master (part thereof) at the University of Amsterdam during the Socrates-Erasmus International Student

Exchange Program of the European Union. 

2005—2010 Polish Language and Culture Master (unfinished), University of Warsaw.

2003—2008 English Language and Culture Master (major: Linguistics) supervised by Prof. J. Welna, University of Warsaw. Thesis: The

semantics of agentive suffixes: a typological perspective.

 

Additional education (selection): 

 

2012, 2013, 2014 Netherlands National Graduate Summer School of Linguistics.

2010 International Summer School on Language Documentation and Description, Leiden.

 

Work

 

2011—2015 Ph.D. project supervised by Drs. P.C. Hengeveld, E.B. Carlin and E.O. Aboh at the University of Amsterdam, titled: When ‘what’

and ‘where’ fall into place: Lokono ontology of landscape terms, funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research.

2011—2015 Full member of Dr. Burenhult’s project Language, Cognition and Landscape at Lund University, funded by the European

Research Council. 

2010—2011 Orthography development internship at Kayeno, a Lokono cultural society in French Guiana, funded by the Leonardo da Vinci

Program of the European Union. 

2008—2009 Language archivization internship at The Language Archive of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the

Netherlands. 

2007—2008 Language documentation internship at the Sri Lanka Malay Documentation Project funded by the Dokumentation Bedrohter

Sprachen Program, University of Amsterdam.

 

 

Publications

 

Rybka, Konrad. in press.a. “Between Objects and Places: The Expression of Landforms in Lokono.” International Journal of American

Linguistics. 

Rybka, Konrad. in press.b. “Contact-Induced Phenomena in Lokono.” In Boundaries and Bridges. Language Contact and Change in

Multilingual Ecologies, edited by Kofi Yakpo and Pieter Muysken. Mouton de Gruyter.

Rybka, Konrad. 2015. “State-of-the-Art in the Development of the Lokono Language.” Language Documentation and Conservation 9: 110–33.

http://hdl.handle.net/10125/24635 

Rybka, Konrad. 2014. “How Are Nouns Categorized as Denoting ‘what’ and ‘where’?.” Language Sciences 45

(September). http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S038800011400028X 

Rybka, Konrad. 2014. "Archive of the Lokono Language (ALL)." In The Language Archive: http://hdl.handle.net/1839/00-0000-0000-000F-

DAEB-B@view

Rybka, Konrad. 2013. Samen Schrijven in Het Arowaks. Paramaribo: ArtSabina. http://dare.uva.nl/document/2/135222

Rybka, Konrad. in review. "The what/where distinction. Linguistic categorization of geographic entities."

Rybka, Konrad. in review. "Place names as a language internally definable class in Lokono." 

Rybka, Konrad. in review. "The Language of Vanishing Ecotopes."

Rybka, Konrad. in prep. “Lokono Story about an Old Woman, Her Daughter, and Two Men.” In Arawakan Trickster Stories, edited by Konrad

Rybka and Swintha Danielsen. Texts in Indigenous Languages of the Americas Series. International Journal of American Linguistics.

Rybka, Konrad and Swintha, Danielsen. in prep. “Introduction.” In Arawakan Trickster Stories, edited by Konrad

Rybka and Swintha Danielsen. Texts in Indigenous Languages of the Americas Series. International Journal of American Linguistics.

Hägerhäll, Caroline M, Åsa Ode Sang, Jan-Eric Englund, Felix Ahlner, Juliette Huber, Konrad Rybka, and Niclas Burenhult. in prep.

“Landscape Preference in Cross-Cultural Perspective.”

 

 

Grants & Awards

 

2015  Library Resident Fellowship to study 19th century Lokono manuscripts, American Philosophical Society. 

2015  Conference Abstract Award for 'The laguage of vanishing ecotopes', ICLDC, Hawaii.

2014  Winner of the Junior Research Day of the Amsterdam Centre for Language and Communication, University of Amsterdam.

2014  Project Grant to organize a Lokono teacher training, Endangered Languages Fund.

2013  Research Mobility Grant of the European Union to visit the Language, Cognition and Landscape project at Lund University.

2012  Research Mobility Grant of the European Union to visit the Language, Cognition and Landscape project at Lund University.

2012  Project Grant for the publication of the Lokono orthography booklet , Society for Endangered Languages.

2011  4 year Ph.D. Grant, Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research.

2010  Leonardo da Vinci Grant to work on the Lokono ortogaphy, European Union. 

2019  Fieldwork Grant for research in Suriname among the Lokono, University of Amsterdam.

2006  Socrates-Erasmus Exchange Grant to study at the University of Amsterdam, European Union. 

 

 

Talks & posters

 

2015  Documenting linguistic and epistemological structure of ecotopes for pedagogical purposes (talk), International Conference on

Language Documentation and Conservation, Hawaii, United States.

2015  Place names and places: an exploration of a Lokono place-naming system (talk), Annual meeting of the American Name Society,

Portland, Oregon.

2014  The role of landscape in revitalizing Lokono linguistic and cultural heritage (poster), CheriSpace conference: Landscape as Heritage

in Science, Amersfoort, the Netherlands.

2014  The language of vanishing ecotopes (talk), NAP-dag, Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

2014  Lokono land rights and language situation in Suriname (talk), Heritage and Rights of Indigenous People, Leiden, the Netherlands.

2014  State-of-the-art in the documentation of Lokono (talk), Biennial Conference of the Society of Caribbean Linguistics, Oranjestad, Aruba.

2013  Between People and Places: The expression of landforms in Lokono (talk), Diversity and Universals in Language, Culture, Cognition

Conference of the Royal Netherlands Research Academy, Leiden, the Netherlands.

2013  Lokono toponymy and topography (talk), Ethnophysiography and landscape linguistics workshop of the ERC project Language,

Cognition and Landscape, Lund, Sweden.

2013  Between Places and Non-Places: directionality as a parameter and a methodological tool (talk), Workshop on Place, Landscape and

Language of the ERC projects: Language, Cognition and Landscape and Human Sociality and Systems of Language Use, Nijmegen, the Netherlands.

2012  Contact-induced phenomena in Lokono (talk), Languages in Suriname workshop of the ERC project Traces of Contact,

Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

2010  Under Suriname’s sway: structural borrowing in Lokono (talk), at the Kréyòl Seminar, Nijmegen, the Netherlands.

2013  Lokono orthography standard (talk), Séminaire langue Arowaka, St. Laurent du Maroni, French Guiana.

2012  Towards a common orthography (talk), International Lokono Language Activists’ Meeting, Georgetown, Guyana.

2010  Photographic impression of the Lokono (talk), De kennis van gisteren, de toekomst van morgen. Leren van de Dorpsoudsten. Wayana

en Lokono Erfgoedconsultaties, Museum Volkenkunde, Leiden, the Netherlands. 

 

 

Teaching experience

 

2013—2014  Leiden University: 4 individual self-designed classes given in Dr. E.B. Carlin’s MA courses Topics in Amerindian

Ethnolinguistics and Indigenous Heritage of the Caribbean:                                  

 - Landscape in Language: landscape as a linguistic domain, cross-linguistic semantics.                                   

 - Amerindian Ethnocartography: content, form, motivation of landscape representation.                                   

 - Language and Space: practical approach to cross-linguistic semantics of spatial relations. 

 - Ethnoecology: theory and methodology (an example of Lokono ecotopic vocabulary).

2014             Self-designed Lokono language course (10 classes) at a Lokono cultural club, Amsterdam based on syllabus including natural

multimedia language data collected in the field; the course is given in Dutch and fully videotaped to make it available online to a larger audience.

2013             Day-long Lokono orthography trainings in villages in Suriname, French Guiana, Guyana explaining morphophonemic rules and

orthography conventions to lay people.

2012             Week-long national Lokono orthography standardization workshop in Suriname explaining what orthography is and how to

arrive at a Lokono standard. 

2009             Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Documenting Endangered Languages workshop:

 - Introduction to ViCoS and Lexus: hands-on introduction to software

 

Other functions

 

Membership:     Society for Caribbean Linguistics, regular member since 2014
                            American Name Society, regular member since 201

Reviewer:           Article about the domain of landscape in linguistics for the journals: Language Sciences and Acta Linguistica Hafniensia.

 

 

Fieldwork

Suriname (Lokono), Guyana (Lokono), French Guyana (Lokono), Colombia (Wayuu)

 

 

Languages

 

Polish (native), English (fluent), Dutch (fluent), Lokono (advanced), German (advanced), Spanish (basic)

bottom of page