Hana El-Shazli
Doctoral Student
Linguistics and Theory of Science unitAbout Hana El-Shazli
I'am a Ph.D. student in Linguistics at Gothenburg University, supervised by Eva-Marie Bloom Ström and Henrik Bergqvist.
My research focuses on the study, description, and documentation of an endangered language, Sanna (Cypriot Maronite Arabic), spoken by a part of the Christian Maronite community in Cyprus. My research is provisory entitled The Sanna Language, A Study of Discourse-Pragmatic markers, Epistemic Features, and Socio-historical dimensions.
I am particularly interested in exploring spontaneous speech in interactional contexts, examining its epistemic and pragmatic aspects while considering the impact of language contact with Cypriot Greek, Cypriot Turkish, English, French, and Italian, on speech and language structure. This analysis is based on interviews and data collected while conducting fieldwork in Cyprus in 2024.
I also investigate the use of Sanna in historical documents across various languages, primarily in Middle-Arabic in Arabic and Karšūnī scripts (Arabic written in western Syriac alphabets), Syriac and Italian, as well as the socio-history of the Maronite community in Cyprus from both diachronic and synchronic perspectives. This work relies on based archival materials , including Ottoman administrative records from the 16th to the 19th centuries accessed at the Türkiye Cumhuriyeti Cumhurbaşkanlığı Devlet Arşivleri Başkanlığı Osmanlı Arşivi (the Ottoman Archives of the Presidency of the Republic of Türkiye Directorate of State Archives), the national archives in Istanbul during June-July 2023, and he Milli Arşiv (the National Archives) in Kyrenia during July-August 2024.
Addtionaly, I consulted secondary sources, specifically letters held at the Vatican archives, specifically the Archivio Storico "de Propaganda Fide" del Dicastero per l'Evangelizzazione, in January 2026.
I obtained my Master's degree in Linguistics and my Bachelor's degree in Arabic and Middle-Eastern Studies from Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales (Inalco) in Paris, France. During my Master's program at INALCO, I conducted two key research projects: "L'emprunt linguistique dans l'arabe chypriote / Linguistic Borrowing in Cypriot Arabic" in (2020) and "Effets du contact de langue, entre supplétisme et bilinguisme: le cas de l'arabe chypriote/ Effects of Language Contact: Between Bilingualism and Suppletion - The Case of Cypriot Arabic" in 2022.