Annie Rialland (born March 17, 1948, in Jans, near

Nantes Nantes (, ; ; or ; ) is a city in the Loire-Atlantique department of France on the Loire, from the Atlantic Ocean, Atlantic coast. The city is the List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, sixth largest in France, with a pop ...

, France) is a French

linguist Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...

who is Director of Research emerita of the

CNRS The French National Centre for Scientific Research (, , CNRS) is the French state research organisation and is the largest fundamental science agency in Europe. In 2016, it employed 31,637 staff, including 11,137 tenured researchers, 13,415 eng ...

Laboratory of Phonetics and Phonology (

Paris Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, largest city of France. With an estimated population of 2,048,472 residents in January 2025 in an area of more than , Paris is the List of ci ...

). Her main domains of expertise are

phonetics Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds or, in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians ...

phonology Phonology (formerly also phonemics or phonematics: "phonemics ''n.'' 'obsolescent''1. Any procedure for identifying the phonemes of a language from a corpus of data. 2. (formerly also phonematics) A former synonym for phonology, often pre ...

, prosody, and African languages.

Education and research

In 1978 Rialland defended her doctoral thesis, “Une langue à tons en terrasses, le gulmancema" at the

University of Paris The University of Paris (), known Metonymy, metonymically as the Sorbonne (), was the leading university in Paris, France, from 1150 to 1970, except for 1793–1806 during the French Revolution. Emerging around 1150 as a corporation associated wit ...

5. In 1988 she defended her thèse d’état, “Systèmes prosodiques africains ou fondements empiriques pour un modèle multilinéaire," at the

University of Nice A university () is an institution of tertiary education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. ''University'' is derived from the Latin phrase , which roughly means "community of teachers and scholars". Univ ...

. From the beginning, her scientific approach combined phonetic and phonological perspectives (

autosegmental phonology Autosegmental phonology is a framework of phonological analysis proposed by John Goldsmith in his PhD thesis in 1976 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). As a theory of phonological representation, autosegmental phonology develo ...

, in particular). Over the years, her work investigated a broad range of languages, mainly African (from various language families: Gur, Mandé,

Atlantic The Atlantic Ocean is the second largest of the world's five oceanic divisions, with an area of about . It covers approximately 17% of Earth's surface and about 24% of its water surface area. During the Age of Discovery, it was known for se ...

Bantu Bantu may refer to: *Bantu languages, constitute the largest sub-branch of the Niger–Congo languages *Bantu peoples, over 400 peoples of Africa speaking a Bantu language * Bantu knots, a type of African hairstyle *Black Association for National ...

), but also

French French may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to France ** French language, which originated in France ** French people, a nation and ethnic group ** French cuisine, cooking traditions and practices Arts and media * The French (band), ...

and the

whistled language Whistled speech is a form of speech surrogacy in which whistling is used to mimic speech. Speakers of more than 80 languages have been found to practice various degrees of whistled speech, most of them in rugged topography or dense forests, whe ...

La Gomera La Gomera () is one of Spain's Canary Islands, in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Africa. With an area of , it is the third-smallest of the archipelago's eight main islands. It belongs to the province of Santa Cruz de Tenerife. La Gomer ...

. She has also supervised doctoral theses on the phonetics and phonology of a diverse range of languages (

Berber Berber or Berbers may refer to: Ethnic group * Berbers, an ethnic group native to Northern Africa * Berber languages, a family of Afro-Asiatic languages Places * Berber, Sudan, a town on the Nile People with the surname * Ady Berber (1913–196 ...

languages,

Japanese Japanese may refer to: * Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia * Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan * Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture ** Japanese diaspor ...

, among others).

Career at the LPP

With

Jacqueline Vaissière Jacqueline Vaissière (born 24 August 1946 in Mont-Saint-Martin, Isère, Mont-Saint-Martin, France) is a French phonetician. Career Vaissière studied computing and automatic language translation under the supervision of Bernard Vauquois, at C ...

, Rialland co-directed the Laboratory of Phonetics and Phonology (LPP) in Paris for 15 years, from 1991 to 2006. Under their direction, the research orientation of the LPP turned towards integrating phonology and phonetics, based on experimental methods. While at the LPP, Rialland was involved in a number of international collaborative projects funded by leading funding agencies. She co-directed, with Laura J. Downing, a French-German ANR-DFG project, BANTUPSYN, devoted to the Phonology-syntax Interface in Bantu languages (2009–2012). Rialland was one of the co-pilots of DIAREF, a project on child

language acquisition Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language. In other words, it is how human beings gain the ability to be aware of language, to understand it, and to produce and use words and s ...

(2010–2013). From 2015 to 2018 Rialland was a member of the French-German ANR-DFG project, BULB, which aims to apply cutting edge speech technologies to help document and analyze unwritten languages (2015–2018).

Honors

Rialland was President of the

Société de Linguistique de Paris The Société de Linguistique de Paris (established 1864) is the editing body of the ''BSL'' (''Bulletin de la Société de Linguistique'') journal. Members of the society have included such well-known French linguists as Bréal, Saussure, Meil ...

in 2016. She received an Honor Award from the

West African Linguistic Society The West African Linguistic Society (abbreviated as WALS) is an academic scholarly society formed in 1965 to foster and encourage research in the West African languages and literature as well as provide a permanent forum for interaction and exchan ...

in 2017. In 2019 she was elected to the Academy of Europe.

Personal life

She was married to G. Nick Clements, an American theoretical phonologist; they are the parents of two children, William R. Clements and Celia A. Clements.

Selected publications

* * Clements, G., & Rialland, A. (2007). Africa as a phonological area. In B. Heine & D. Nurse (Eds.), ''A Linguistic Geography of Africa'' (Cambridge Approaches to Language Contact, pp. 36-85). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511486272.004 * * * *

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Rialland, Annie Living people French women linguists 1948 births Linguists from France Phoneticians Phonologists from France Members of Academia Europaea Research directors of the French National Centre for Scientific Research