Katerina Somers

Katerina Somers is an Assistant Professor of German in the Department of German, Nordic, and Slavic+ at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (USA). Her research has focused on syntactic and morphosyntactic change in Germanic. More recently, she has applied sociolinguistic methodologies to the analysis of historical texts. In particular, she aims to establish orality and literacy as two of the most important sociocultural contexts that shaped attestations of medieval German varieties. This research program revolves around a more expansive proposition: the history of the German language, as historical linguists have understood it, is in fact a history of the literization of the German language.