Søren Wichmann is a Danish linguist

Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....

 specializing in Mesoamerican languages

Mesoamerican languages

Mesoamerican languages are the languages indigenous to the Mesoamerican cultural area, which covers southern Mexico, all of Guatemala and Belize and parts of Honduras and El Salvador. The area is characterized by extensive linguistic diversity containing several hundred different languages and...

 and epigraphy

Epigraphy

Epigraphy Epigraphy Epigraphy (from the , literally "on-writing", is the study of inscriptions or epigraphs as writing; that is, the science of identifying the graphemes and of classifying their use as to cultural context and date, elucidating their meaning and assessing what conclusions can be...

. He has written extensively about Mayan

Mayan languages

The Mayan languages form a language family spoken in Mesoamerica and northern Central America. Mayan languages are spoken by at least 6 million indigenous Maya, primarily in Guatemala, Mexico, Belize and Honduras...

, Oto-Manguean

Oto-Manguean languages

Oto-Manguean languages are a large family comprising several families of Native American languages. All of the Oto-Manguean languages that are now spoken are indigenous to Mexico, but the Manguean branch of the family, which is now extinct, was spoken as far south as Nicaragua and Costa Rica.The...

 and Mixe–Zoquean languages. He has done fieldwork on Mixe

Mixe languages

The Mixe languages are languages of the Mixean branch of the Mixe–Zoquean language family indigenous to southern Mexico. According to a 1995 classification, there are seven of them...

, Texistepec Popoluca

Texistepec Popoluca

Texistepec Popoluca also called Texistepec Zoque is a Mixe–Zoquean language of the Zoquean branch spoken by around 400 indigenous Popoluca people in and around the town of Texistepec in Southern Veracruz, Mexico....

 and Tlapanec

Tlapanec language

Tlapanec is an indigenous Mexican language spoken by more than 98,000 Tlapanec people in the state of Guerrero. Like other Oto-Manguean languages, it is tonal and has complex inflectional morphology...

. Regarding Mixe–Zoquean, he has done comparative work resulting in the currently most accepted classification of the Mixe–Zoquean language family as well as a reconstruction of its vocabulary and grammar (Wichmann 1995). He also specializes in the study of Maya hieroglyphs

Maya script

The Maya script, also known as Maya glyphs or Maya hieroglyphs, is the writing system of the pre-Columbian Maya civilization of Mesoamerica, presently the only Mesoamerican writing system that has been substantially deciphered...

 — particularly the linguistic aspects of the deciphering of the Mayan script. His PhD

PHD

PHD may refer to:*Ph.D., a doctorate of philosophy*Ph.D. , a 1980s British group*PHD finger, a protein sequence*PHD Mountain Software, an outdoor clothing and equipment company*PhD Docbook renderer, an XML renderer...

 thesis treated the Azoyú variety of Tlapanec.

Wichmann is since April 2009 a Senior Scientist in the Department of Linguistics, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

The Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology is a research institute based in Leipzig, Germany, founded in 1997. It is part of the Max Planck Society network....

 and since July 2007 a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Leiden.

Beginning in 2010 Wichmann has been the Editor of Language Dynamics and Change.

Partial bibliography

• 2004 (Ed.), The Linguistics of Maya Writing. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.
• 2002, Diccionario analítico del popoluca de Texistepec. México, D.F.: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.
• 1996, Cuentos colorados en popoluca de Texistepec. København: C.A. Reitzel.
• 1995, The Relationship among the Mixe–Zoquean Languages of Mexico. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.