Radu Voica

PhD Student

Radu studied English, Romanian and Romance Linguistics at the University of Craiova (Romania). At that time he was mostly interested in the sociology of language and wrote his 1992 graduation thesis on metalinguistic aspects of language, with particular reference to Romanian and English. He then worked as a secondary teacher in Romania until 1995, when he moved to Greece, the homeland of his grandparents, and taught in different private language schools in Athens.

In 2001 he established the teaching of Romanian at the Democritus University of Thrace (Greece), where he lectured till 2005. During that period he also assisted historians and palaeographers working on early Romanian manuscripts, discovered in the archives of the Holy Monasteries of Simonopetra, St. Paul and Xeropotamou (Mount Athos).

Radu came to SOAS as a postgraduate student in 2005 and completed the ELAP MA in Language Documentation and Description in 2006. His dissertation was on the meaning and distribution of the Simple and Compound Past in Aromanian, a highly endangered Romance language spoken in the Balkans (abstract).

For his PhD project, started in September 2006, he shifted to Austronesian and, having been awarded an ELDP grant (http://www.hrelp.org/grants/projects/index.php?projid=122), is currently documenting and describing Blablanga, an Oceanic language belonging to the Northwest Solomonic linkage and spoken on Santa Isabel, in the Solomon Islands. Radu has spent a total of 12 months in the field and he collected a substantial amount of data.

Radu’s main interests are in documentary and descriptive linguistics, language contact, variation and change,information structure, phonology and phonetics.