Welcome

I'm a professor of Linguistics at Reed College and co-editor of the Journal of South Asian Linguistics. I focus on phonetics and phonology, meaning I'm interested in the physical attributes of language, the complex patterns they form, and the abstract representations they embody in our mental grammars.

My primary research specializations are the intonation (prosody) and voice quality (phonation) of various spoken languages, predominantly those of South Asia. You can learn about my model of Bengali intonation, which I have been expanding to cover the prosodically diverse languages of South Asia. I've also most recently begun phonetic research on Bangladeshi Sign Language (BdSL) and its relation to other sign languages of South Asia.

Every year, I teach phonetics and the phonetics/phonology half of our introductory course on formal linguistics, both courses being open to students with no linguistics background. Every other year, I also teach courses on phonological theory and on current research topics on the phonetics and phonology of both spoken and signed languages. On a rotating basis, I also teach courses on intonation, field methods, methods of design and analysis, and South Asian languages.

I serve as the director of our department's Lab of Linguistics, where our faculty and students conduct research on diverse languages and their varieties.

My ORCID page can be accessed here, and you can download my CV here.

Personal

My primary and professional language is English, and I conduct my research primarily using English and Bengali. When I'm with my blended family I speak a mix of Bengali, English, and Spanish. I also enjoy practicing the languages I've studied formally: ASL, Mandarin, German, and Arabic. And while I don't have fluency in Gujarati, Bangladeshi Sign Language (BdSL), K'iche', Kazakh, or any of the many other languages I've studied only as a phonetician and phonologist, I can never learn enough about them.

In English, please use either "they" or "he" in third-person reference to me.

If you're addressing me, just call me "Sameer". If you're citing me, please write "Khan" if using just surnames, "Khan, SD" if including initials, and "Khan, Sameer ud Dowla" for the full name. That's [səˈmiɹuˌdoʊɫ͡lə kʰɑn] in English, and [ˈsamiɹud̪ːowla kʰan] in Bengali.

I'm pretty confident that I'm the only one in the universe with my name. "Sameer ud Dowla" is an Arabic phrase my Bengali-English bilingual parents cobbled together by plugging in the first name of the first queer person my mother met into the phonological template my father's family uses for all its sons' names [{s,ʃ}aC(i)Cud̪ːowla], and no one thought to look up the resulting meaning: سَمِيرُ الدَّوْلَة samīr-u d-dawla is 'the late-night conversational companion of the state'.