Robert Nicolaï

Robert Nicolaï is a French professor of linguistics and an internationally respected specialist in African languages ​​, especially for Songhai languages. He teaches at the University of Nice Sophia -Antipolis. Nicolaï is the founder and co- editor of the Journal of Language Contact.

After several years in Niger, where he in 1975 the Department of Linguistics at the University of Niamey Abdou - Moumouni - founded, he headed from 1984 to 1988 the "Institute for inter-ethnic and intercultural studies " ( Institut d' études et de recherches et interethniques interculturelles ) on the University of Nice. Since 1988 he is a member in various functions of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS ). He was a guest at the Universities of Frankfurt am Main (1997-1998) and Vienna (2004-2005) and at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, 2005.

Honors

1997 Nicolaï was awarded the Research Prize of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation ( Gay - Lussac- Humboldt Prize ) and appointed to the University Institute of France in 2004.