SLE 59 in Osnabrück
Researcher · Dept. of Linguistics and Philology · Uppsala University
John L.A. Huisman
I am a linguist broadly investigating the patterns and process of linguistic diversity and language change, with a particular interest in semantics.
01 / About me
I am currently working as a Research Fellow at Uppsala University, on a project investigating variability in body part semantics and its consequences for body part metaphors, funded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities (KVHAA).
I obtained my PhD (cum laude) from Radboud University / International Max Planck Research School for Language Sciences in Nijmegen (the Netherlands), working in the Meaning Culture & Cognition lab led by Professor Asifa Majid. In my thesis, I investigated semantic variation in colour terms, body part vocabulary, and cutting and breaking descriptions across Japonic, focusing on the endangered Ryukyuan languages.
02 / Research
My research is largerly quantitative and data-rich, building on primary language data gathered through in-person and online stimulus-based elicitation tasks. Below are three current focus araes.
01
Body part semantics
Variation and change in the semantics of body part terminology across languages.
02
Language of Perception
Cross-linguistic variation in how speakers of different languages encode sensory experiences.
03
the Japonic languages
Primary area of language expertise, covering dialectology, historical linguistics, and semantic typology.
03 / Publications
Recent work.
2026
Boundaries and continua: a unified analysis of linguistic variation across countries and linguistic areas
Bakker F · van Hout R · Huisman JLA
Journal of Linguistic Geography (in press)
2026
An expanded model for perceptual norming: insights from Japanese ideophones
McLean B · Do Y · Thompson AL · Huisman JLA
Topics in Cognitive Science:
2025
Combined lexical and phonotactic data resolve uncertainties in the evolutionary diversification of the Japonic language family
Huisman JLA · McLean B · Wu CH
Journal of Language Evolution 10(1): lzaf002
All publications ↗
04 / Blog