Rate My Professor Keith Langston

Keith Langston is University Professor, Head of the Department of Linguistics, and Undergraduate Coordinator at the University of Georgia, where he holds the position of Professor of Linguistics and serves as an affiliated faculty member in the Department of Germanic & Slavic Studies. He earned his Ph.D. in Slavic Linguistics from Yale University in 1994, with additional degrees including an M.Phil. and M.A. in Slavic Linguistics from Yale and a B.Mus. in Piano Performance from the University of Alabama in 1986. Before joining the University of Georgia faculty in 1995 as Assistant Professor in Germanic & Slavic Studies, he taught as Lecturer in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University from 1992 to 1995. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 2001 and Professor in 2015. Langston has held numerous administrative roles, including Head of Germanic & Slavic Studies from 2003 to 2006 and Interim Head from 2015 to 2016, Director of the Linguistics Program from 2016 to 2017, and Head of the Linguistics Department since 2017. He developed the A.B. in Russian degree program, coordinated the Russian language program from 1995 to 2017, and led the transition of the linguistics program to a full department.

Langston's research interests encompass Slavic prosody and the phonology/morphology interface, historical Slavic linguistics and accentology, and sociolinguistics with a focus on language and identity as well as language contact in the former Yugoslavia. He is Principal Investigator for the NSF-funded project Endangered Languages in Contact in Istria and Kvarner, Croatia (2022–2026, $449,712), aimed at creating a multilingual spoken corpus for language documentation. His major publications include the book Čakavian Prosody: The Accentual Patterns of the Čakavian Dialects of Croatian (2006, Slavica Publishers), a standard reference in Slavic accentuation studies; Language Planning and National Identity in Croatia (2014, Palgrave Macmillan, with Anita Peti-Stantić); Hrvatsko jezično pitanje danas: Identiteti i ideologije (2013, with Anita Peti-Stantić); Čakavska prozodija (2015, Matica hrvatska); and articles such as Prescriptive Accentual Norms vs. Usage in Croatian: An Acoustic Study of Standard Pronunciation (Journal of Slavic Linguistics, 2018), contributions to the Handbook of Comparative and Historical Indo-European Linguistics (2018), and recent papers on Čakavian transcription models (2024). He co-edited the Silver Anniversary Issue of the Journal of Slavic Linguistics (2017). Langston received the University Professor title for 2023–2024 for his influential leadership, along with the Franklin College Outstanding Academic Advisor Award (2010) and various research grants.