Yaron Matras, Associate Fellow of LCSCA

Professor Yaron Matras is a linguist with an interest in multilingualism and minority languages. Until 2020 he was Professor of Linguistics at the University of Manchester, where he founded and led the Multilingual Manchester research unit and the Romani Project, and was British Academy Wolfson Professorial Fellow. He currently holds honorary affiliations with the Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics, the University of Haifa, and Humboldt University in Berlin as well as with the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg Institute for Advanced Study.

He is a campaigner for Israeli-Palestinian dialogue and for the rights of Romani people, immigrants and refugees. He has an interest in the semantics and semiotics of anti-Jewish discourses (particularly those that self-ascribe as progressive), in understanding antisemitism in the context of other forms of racism (particularly Romaphobia/antigypsyism and Islamophobia), in the challenges of disentangling antisemitism and critique of Zionism, and in manifestations of antisemitism in UK universities.

He is the author of numerous books on language and linguistics as well as of ‘I met lucky people’: The story of the Romani Gypsies (Penguin Press, 2014) and The Romani Gypsies (Harvard University Press 2015). His most recent book, Speech and the city: Multilingualism, decoloniality and the civic university is due to appear with Cambridge University Press in the spring of 2024.

Personal website: yaronmatras.org