Alessandra Francone

Alessandra Francone is a current 2nd year PhD researcher in the LCL department at SOAS, focusing on the effects of sociohistory and sociocultural context on lexical borrowing. Her supervisors are Dr Christopher Lucas and Prof Lutz Marten. She presented her project at the CoHUM Symposium at SOAS in December 2024. She is a grateful recipient of a CHASE Studentship. She was awarded a first-class MA (Hons) in Linguistics and English Language from the University of Edinburgh in 2022. 

She presented her master’s research titled “Directionality of lexical borrowing in southern Bougainville in the semantic domains of flora, fauna, and basic colour terms” at the 17th Conference on Austronesian & Papuan Languages & Linguistics (APLL17) in Cologne, Germany in July 2025. Publication of this work is not currently in progress. Other conference attendance includes UPLD in Riga, Latvia in March 2025.

Her main research focuses are historical linguistics and contact-induced language chang, especially in relation to lexical borrowing. She also works in the vicinity of lexical semantics and semantic shift. Her regions of focus include the central Mediterranean islands and southern Italy, the Baltic Sea region, and New Guinea, especially Western Papua. Her sociohistorical domain focuses are maritime and agricultural history. 

Her minor research interests include linguistic anthropology, language documentation and description, endangered languages, colour and other specialised terminology, dialectology, and historical sociolinguistics. Following her successful upgrade in mid-2025, she is in the midst of preparations for the bulk of her data collection and processing. She has done site visits to various places in the Baltic region, including in Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. In the future, this project will likely include a period of fieldwork. Preliminary results of this year’s work may be ready for presentation by next year; however, publication of first year work is not in progress and is also not expected for second year work. 

• Historical linguistics
• Contact linguistics
• Contact-induced language change
• Lexical borrowing
• Basic vocabulary
• Linguistic anthropology
• Mediterranean languages
• Baltic languages
• Endangered languages
• Language description and documentation
• Papuan and Austronesian languages