Balthasar Bickel (born December 19, 1965) is a Swiss linguist. He combines fieldwork, typology, and evolutionary modelling and uses both experimental and observational methods.
He is currently a professor at the Department of Comparative Language Science at theUniversity of Zurich. Between 2002 and 2011, he taught at theLeipzig University in Germany. He received his graduate training at theMax Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen and earned his doctoral degree from the University of Zurich. As a postdoctoral researcher, he spent several years at theUniversity of California, Berkeley, where he became a close collaborator ofJohanna Nichols.
Bickel has made contributions to the study oftense andaspect,grammatical agreement andgrammatical relations,morphological typology, phonological word domains, areal typology,linguistic relativity, and to quantitative methods in language typology. He has done extensive fieldwork on a number of Kiranti languages of Nepal, especiallyBelhare,Chintang andPuma. He is former co-editor of the journalStudies in Language.
Research out of Bickel's lab suggests that with the spread ofagriculture and a switch to softer foods theoverbite common among children became more prevalent in adults resulting in an increase inlabiodentals such as "f" and "v" in human language.[1]
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