James P. Kirby
Institut für Phonetik und Sprachverarbeitung
LMU München

About

I am a linguist and speech scientist. My research focuses on tone and register, sound change, computational and statistical methods for speech processing, and language and music, with an areal focus on languages of East and Southeast Asia.

I received an MA from the University of California-San Diego in 2005 completed my PhD at the University of Chicago in 2010 under the supervision of Alan Yu and John Goldsmith. I spent the next 10 years in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at the University of Edinburgh, where I remain an Honorary Fellow. In 2021, I moved to the LMU Munich to take up the Bavarian AI Chair in Spoken Language Processing at the Institute of Phonetics and Speech Processing.

I have previously been the recipient of an AHRC Early Career fellowship (2015-2017) to study tonal text-setting, and together with Marc Brunelle, an AHRC Research Grant to investigate the evolution of register in Southeast Asia (2017-2021). I am currently Principle Investigator of the ERC-funded EVOTONE project, studying the emergence and evolution of linguistic tone.