CV
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-
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)