Keith Langston

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University Professor, Department Head, Undergraduate Coordinator

Keith Langston is Professor of Linguistics and an affiliated faculty member in the Department of Germanic & Slavic Studies. He received his Ph.D. in Slavic Linguistics from Yale University, where he also taught for three years as a lecturer before joining the UGA faculty in 1995. His research interests include Slavic prosody and the phonology/morphology interface; historical Slavic linguistics and accentology; and sociolinguistics, with a focus on questions of language and identity and language contact in the former Yugoslavia. He is currently PI for the NSF-funded project "Endangered languages in contact in Istria and Kvarner, Croatia: A multilingual spoken corpus for language documentation and research."

Education:

Ph.D., Slavic Linguistics, Yale University
M.A., Slavic Linguistics, Yale University
B.Mus., Piano Performance, University of Alabama

Areas of Interest:
Corpus Methods
Historical Linguistics
Phonetics and Phonology
Sociolinguistics and Language Variation
Syntax and Morphology
Specific Research Areas:

Slavic prosody and the phonology/morphology interface; historical Slavic linguistics and accentology; and sociolinguistics, with a focus on questions of language and identity and language contact in the former Yugoslavia.

Grants:

National Science Foundation (BCS #2220425). "Endangered languages in contact: A multilingual spoken corpus for language documentation and research," $449,712. Principal Investigator, 2022-2026.

Selected Publications:

Austin Jones, Shulin Zhang, John Hale, Margaret Renwick, Zvjezdana Vrzić, and Keith Langston. 2024. “Comparing Kaldi-based pipeline ELPIS and Whisper for Čakavian transcription.” In Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on NLP Applications to Field Linguistics (Field Matters 2024), pages 61–68, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2024.fieldmatters-1.8

Shulin Zhang, John Hale, Margaret Renwick, Zvjezdana Vrzić, and Keith Langston. 2024. “An Evaluation of Croatian ASR Models for Čakavian Transcription.” In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 1098–1104, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL. https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.98/

Petar Vuković and Keith Langston. 2020. “Croatian”. In Lenore Grenoble, Pia Lane, and Unn Røyneland (eds.), Linguistic Minorities in Europe Online. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/lme.11420181.

Langston, Keith. 2020. “Čakavian.” In Greenberg, Marc L. et al. (eds.), Encyclopedia of Slavic Languages and Linguistics Online. Leiden–Boston: Brill. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/2589-6229_ESLO_COM_032011.

Langston, Keith. 2018. Evaluating the Effects of Language Planning Efforts in Croatia: Evidence from Corpus Data. In Stephen M. Dickey and Mark Richard Lauersdorf (eds.), V zeleni drželi zeleni breg: Studies in Honor of Marc L. Greenberg. Columbus, OH: Slavica, 157-198.

Langston, Keith. 2018. Prescriptive Accentual Norms vs. Usage in Croatian: An Acoustic Study of Standard Pronunciation. Journal of Slavic Linguistics 26(2), 245-305.

Langston, Keith. 2018. The Documentation of Slavic. In Jared Klein, Brian Joseph, Matthias Fritz, and Mark Wenthe (eds.), Handbook of Comparative and Historical Indo-European Linguistics, Vol 3. (Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science 41/3.) Berlin-New York: De Gruyter Mouton, 1397-1413.

Langston, Keith. 2018. The Morphology of Slavic. In Jared Klein, Brian Joseph, Matthias Fritz, and Mark Wenthe (eds.), Handbook of Comparative and Historical Indo-European Linguistics, Vol 3. (Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science 41/3.) Berlin-New York: De Gruyter Mouton, 1538-1557.

Langston, Keith. 2017. Slavic Sociolinguistics in the Post-Iron Curtain World: A Survey of Recent Research. Journal of Slavic Linguistics 25(2): 417-440.

Langston, Keith and Anita Peti-Stantić. 2014. Language planning and national identity in Croatia. Basingstoke-New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Peti-Stantić, Anita and Keith Langston. 2013. Hrvatsko jezično pitanje danas: Identiteti i ideologije [The Croatian Language Question Today: Identities and Ideologies]. Zagreb: Srednja Europa.

Langston, Keith. 2006. Čakavian Prosody: The Accentual Patterns of the Čakavian Dialects of Croatian. Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers.

Awards and Special Recognitions:

University Professor, 2024

Courses Taught:
LING 2100
LING 3250
LING 4905/6905
LING 8021
LING 8120
Articles Featuring Keith Langston
"Comparing Kandi-Based Pipeline Elpis and Whisper for Cakavian Transcription" Title Card

Summer Recap: “Endangered Languages in Contact in Isria and Kvarner, Coratia (ELIC)”

As part of Dr. Keith Langston’s NSF grant, this summer some faculty and graduate students collaborated and presented on their project “Endangered Languages in Contact in Istria and Kvarner, Croatia (ELIC)” at two different conferences.

 

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Headshot of Dr. Keith Langston in front of Joe Brown Hall

Linguistics Department Head Keith Langston named University Professor

Dr. Keith Langston was honored this week for his "influential vision and leadership" and "significant impact on UGA" with the title of 2023-2024 University Professor alongside Dr. Paula Lemons, Professor and Associate Dean of Franklin College. 


Linguistics Department Summer 2023 Round-Up

This past summer, Linguistics faculty and students represented UGA at several conferences. We are excited about all of the phenomenal research taking place in the department, and we would like to take the opportunity to recognize some of the projects that…

photo of Hale, Renwick, and Langston

Linguistics faculty receive NSF grant

Keith Langston, Professor of Linguistics, was recently awarded a three-year, $450,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to study endangered languages on the Istrian peninsula of Croatia and the Kvarner Bay in the northern Adriatic Sea.

Contact Information

langston@uga.edu
Office: 108 Joe Brown Hall
Office Hours: Fall 2025: TBA
Phone: 706-542-2448

Other Information

Curriculum Vitae: Langston_cv_web_July_2025.pdf (222.91 KB)
Professional Web site: https://keith-langston.com, https://elic-corpus.uga.edu
Other Affiliations: Department of Germanic & Slavic Studies

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