Katarzyna Wojtylak

Katarzyna (Kasia) I. Wojtylak (PhD James Cook University) is an Adjunct Research Fellow at the Language and Culture Research Centre (LCRC). Since October 2018, Kasia has taken on a one-year position at the University of Regensburg, Germany, as a lecturer in Linguistics. Kasia's main research focus are Amazonian languages and contact linguistics. Since 2010, she have been working with the Witoto Murui people (Witotoan, Northwest Amazonia).

After completing two BA’s (2009, 2010) and an MPhil in Linguistics (2012) at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, in 2013, Kasia embarked on a PhD in Anthropological Linguistics at JCU. In December 2017, she graduated summa cum laude; her thesis is a reference grammar of Witoto Murui praised by the examiners as “earning a fully deserved place within the top 5% dissertations of its kind”.

The main significance of Kasia's work lies in formulating generalizations concerning the typology of linguistic borrowing and providing reconstructions, comparative dictionaries, and further documentation for endangered languages of Caquetá-Putumayo (C-P) spoken in southern Colombia and northern Peru.