Director, African Studies Center; Professor, Linguistics
About
Andries Coetzee is professor of linguistics and director of the African Studies Center. He received his BA (1992) and MA (1996) in Semitic Languages from the North-West University in South Africa, and a PhD in Linguistics (2004) from the University of Massachusetts.
Coetzee started his academic career in South Africa, where he taught Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac and Arabic at the North-West University. Since 2004, he has been on the faculty of the Department of Linguistics at U-M. He has been involved in various capacities in the African Studies Center since its founding in 2008, including serving on the Executive Committee for several years, and as associate director in 2017/18.
Coetzee has served on several U-M committees, including the LSA Curriculum Committee and the Provost's Faculty Advisor Committee. He is a fellow of the Linguistic Society of America, and is editor of Language, the flagship journal of this society. Coetzee holds an honorary appointment as Extraordinary Professor at his South African alma mater, the North-West University.
Coetzee's research straddles the areas of theoretical and descriptive linguistics. On the theoretical side, most of his research has focused on the formal modeling of phonological and phonetic variation. Since 2014, the empirical focus of his research has shifted to documenting the complex linguistic landscape of post-apartheid South Africa. He is also involved in a multi-year project documenting the unique variety of Afrikaans spoken in a 120 year old expatriate community in rural Patagonia, Argentina.
His other ongoing research focuses on the linguistic landscape of Potchefstroom, a mid-sized post-apartheid South African city. In collaboration with South African colleagues, Coetzee investigates how changes in society brought about by the end of apartheid are impacting language usage patterns, and simultaneously resulting in language change. Similar to the Patagonia project, this collaboration also interrogates the relationships between language and identity, language and belonging, and language and inclusion/exclusion.
