Education and Previous Positions

Since January 2026
Reseach associate (research group leader) in the Emmy Noether project The Linguistic (Pre-)History of the Indo-Iranian Frontier funded by the German Research Foundation, Institute of Iranian Studies, Freie Universität Berlin

January–November 2025
Co-PI of the research project A Digital Corpus of the Issyk-Kushan Inscriptions, funded by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation

2023–2025
Research associate with the Walter Benjamin project An Etymological Dictionary of the Nuristani Nominal Lexicon, funded by the German Research Foundation at the Chair of Comparative Philology, University of Würzburg

2020–2023
Ph.D. in Linguistics, University of Cologne (Ph.D. scholarship of the a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School for the Humanities Cologne), topic of the dissertation: A Grammatical Description of the Katë Language (Nuristani)

2017–2020
Research assistant in the research project VedaWeb – An Online Research Platform for Old Indic Texts, funded by the German Research Foundation

2017–2019
M.A. in Linguistics & Phonetics and Languages & Cultures of the Islamic World, University of Cologne

2013–2017
B.A. in Linguistics, University of Leipzig

Jakob Halfmann is group leader of the Emmy Noether research group „The Linguistic (Pre‑)History of the Indo-Iranian Frontier“ funded by the German Research Foundation. His research focuses on historical linguistics and language documentation/description with a focus on Indo-Iranian languages, especially the Nuristani group and ancient and modern Iranian and Indo-Aryan languages of the Hindu Kush region.

Additionally he is interested in paths and mechanisms of language change in general and in several other language families (especially Mayan, Semitic and Nakh-Daghestanian).

Books/Theses:

• Halfmann, Jakob. 2025. The Diversification of Indo-Iranian and the Position of the Nuristani Languages. Wiesbaden: Reichert.
• Halfmann, Jakob. 2024. A Grammatical Description of the Katë Language (Nuristani). Revised and expanded version of the Ph.D. dissertation. Available at: https://kups.ub.uni-koeln.de/73732/

Articles:

• Halfmann, Jakob. 2025. On the etymology of New Persian malang ‘intoxicated; unorthodox dervish’. Journal of Iranian Linguistics 2(1). 30–35. https://doi.org/10.46991/jil/2025.01.02
• Halfmann, Jakob. 2025. The diachronic typology of retroflex vowels. In Holly Kennard, Emily Lindsay-Smith, Aditi Lahiri & Martin Maiden (eds.), Historical Linguistics 2022. Selected Papers from the 25th ICHL, Oxford, 1-5 August 2022, 50–61. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.369.04hal
• Fries, Simon, Svenja Bonmann, Jakob Halfmann & Natalie Korobzow. 2025. Observations on Lines 1–3 of the Gāndhārī Part of the Dašt-i Nāwur Trilingual (DN IV). Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 175(1). 137–161. https://doi.org/10.13173/ZDMG.175.1.137
• Halfmann, Jakob. 2024. Observations on Gāndhārī Orthography and Phonology. ST clusters and related problems. Bhāṣā. Journal of South Asian Linguistics, Philology and Grammatical Traditions 3(2). 193–212. http://doi.org/10.30687/bhasha/2785-5953/2024/02/002
• Halfmann, Jakob, Svenja Bonmann, Simon Fries & Natalie Korobzow. 2024. A New Reading of the Bactrian Part of the Dašt-i Nāwur Trilingual (DN I). Indo-Iranian Journal 67(1). 5–51. https://doi.org/10.1163/15728536-06701005
• Halfmann, Jakob. 2023. Nuristani theonyms in light of historical phonology. In Alberto Cacopardo & Augusto Cacopardo (eds.), Roots of Peristan – The Pre-Islamic Cultures of the Hindukush/Karakorum. Proceedings of the International Interdisciplinary Conference, ISMEO, Rome, Palazzo Baleani, 5–7 October, 2022 (Serie Orientale Roma n.s. 37), 317–358. Rome: ISMEO / Scienze e Lettere.
• Halfmann, Jakob. 2023. Lād ‘law’ – a Bactrian loanword in the Nuristani languages. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 86(3). 505–510. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0041977X23000836
• Bonmann, Svenja, Jakob Halfmann, Natalie Korobzow & Bobomullo Bobomulloev. 2023. A partial decipherment of the unknown Kushan script. Transactions of the Philological Society 121(2). 293–329. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-968X.12269
• Fries, Simon, Jakob Halfmann, Eugen Hill & Denise Hübner. 2023. From noun to future tense. The functional diachrony of the l-future in the Nuristani languages and its typological background. Language Typology and Universals (STUF) 76(1). 53–85. https://doi.org/10.1515/stuf-2023-2002
• Halfmann, Jakob. 2022. Advances in the historical phonology of the Nuristani languages. International Journal of Diachronic Linguistics and Linguistic Reconstruction (IJDL) 19. 113–134. https://doi.org/10.29091/9783752002348
• Halfmann, Jakob. 2021. Terminological proposals for the Nuristani languages. Himalayan Linguistics 20(1). 28–64. https://doi.org/10.5070/H920150079

Data sets

• Casaretto, Antje, Pascal Coenen, Anna Fischer, Jakob Halfmann, Natalie Korobzow, Daniel Kölligan & Uta Reinöhl. 2023. The morphologically glossed Rigveda - The Zurich annotation corpus revised and extended. Hosted by VedaWeb - Online Research Platform for Old Indic Texts. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/ZENODO.8410655
• Halfmann, Jakob & Abdul Nasir Mansur. 2023. Katë Proverbs. Audio recordings with time-aligned transcription and translation. Collection “Nuristani Archive Cologne (NurAC)”. Language Archive Cologne (LAC). https://lac.uni-koeln.de/bundle/11341/0000-0000-0000-4086.

Reviews (Selection):

• Halfmann, Jakob. 2024. Review of Zoller, Claus Peter: Indo-Aryan and the Linguistic History and Prehistory of North India. Part I & II. Kratylos 69. 134–62.