Ohio State is in the process of revising websites and program materials to accurately reflect compliance with the law. While this work occurs, language referencing protected class status or other activities prohibited by Ohio Senate Bill 1 may still appear in some places. However, all programs and activities are being administered in compliance with federal and state law.

Bjoern Koehnlein

Bjoern Koehnlein

This picture shows a man in a blue shirt; he also has a beard, which is more permanent than the shirt.

Contact Information

Professor
he/him

Email
Email Bjoern Koehnlein koehnlein.3@osu.edu
Office
305 Oxley Hall, 1712 Neil Ave. Columbus, OH 43210
Google Map

Professional Website

Office Hours

SP26
Monday: 1-2:15pm
Thursday: 1-2pm
In person by default, but Zoom can certainly be arranged upon request

Areas of Expertise

  • Theoretical Phonology
  • Historical Phonology
  • Germanic Languages
  • Word Stress / Tone / Intonation

Education

  • PhD in Linguistics, Leiden University, 2011

Björn Köhnlein is a Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the Ohio State University. His core expertise is phonology – particularly interactions of metrical structure, (intonational) tone, and segmental structure – and its interfaces with phonetics and morphology, from both a synchronic and a diachronic typological perspective. His current primary focus is on so-called tone accent languages that combine word stress and tonal distinctions (such as Franconian, Lithuanian, or Swedish). In his research, he combines elements from historical linguistics, phonetics, psycholinguistics, and dialectology with phonological theory, often based on original fieldwork.

After holding a position as a research fellow at the Forschungszentrum Deutscher Sprachatlas in Marburg (Germany) from 2005, Björn Köhnlein started working on his Ph.D. project at the Meertens Instituut Amsterdam and at Leiden University (Netherlands) in 2007. He received his Ph.D. in 2011. Until 2015, he worked as an Assistant Professor at Leiden University. He also held two postdoctoral positions: from 2011 to 2012, he was part of the project Taalportaal - Language Portal Dutch and Frisian, an online grammar of Dutch. In 2014, he spent one semester at Ben Gurion University in Beer Sheva, Israel, working on the interaction of tonal accent and word order (object shift) in Scandinavian. He joined the faculty at Ohio State University in 2015.

Filed in: