Keynote Speakers for the conference include leading researchers on Turkic, Iranian, and Mongolian linguistics, as well as second language acquisition:

	Baris Kabak, Professor, Department of British and American Studies, University of Würzburg, Germany Live Streamed on October 8, 2016 @ 11:30 am EST Professor Kabak, a native of Istanbul, studied English Language Teaching and Linguistics at Bogazici (Bosphorus) University in Istanbul, Turkey and at the State University of New York at Binghamton, NY. He completed his graduate studies in Linguistics and Cognitive Science at the University of Delaware. Kabak is currently a Professor of English Linguistics in the Institute of Modern Languages at the University of Würzburg. Before UW, he worked at the University of Konstanz, and was a senior associate member at St. Antony's College at the University of Oxford. His research interests include phonology and phonetics, bilingualism and second language acquisition, morphosyntax, English Linguistics, and Turkic languages and linguistics.
	Arsalan Kahnemuyipour, Assoc Professor, Department of Linguistics, University of Toronto, Canada Live Streamed on October 7, 2016 @ 11:30 am EST Professor Kahnemuyipour received his PhD in Linguistics from the Department of Linguistics at the University of Toronto Mississauga, Canada where he is also currently an Associate Professor of Linguistics. Kahnemuyipor has also previously taught at Syracuse University. His research interests include theoretical linguistics, syntax, morphology, syntax-phonology interface, copular clauses, and Persian language and linguistics. Besides his native Persian, he has worked on English, Armenian, Turkish, Niuean, and other languages. He is the author of The Syntax of Sentential Stress (Oxford University Press) and several articles in top ranked journals such as Natural Language and Linguistic Theory and Linguistic Inquiry.
	Silvina Montrul, Professor, Department of Linguistics, University of Illinois, USA Live Streamed on October 7, 2016 @ 2:30 pm EST Professor Montrul received her PhD in Linguistics from the Department of Linguistics at McGill University. Montrul is currently an Professor of Linguistics and Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, as well as Second Language Acquisition at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She specializes in the generative approach to second language acquisition and her research interests include adult second language acquisition of syntax and morphology, incomplete acquisition of language, heritage language learning, and the acquisition of Spanish. She has authored several books, including The Acquisition of Heritage Languages (Cambridge University Press) and Incomplete Acquisition in Bilingualism: Re-examining the Age Factor (John Benjamins), as well as published numerous articles in scholarly journals. In 2013, Montrul was named the University Scholar for University of Illinois, and she is currently the co-chief editor of the Second Language Research journal
	György Kara, Professor, Department of Central Eurasian Studies, Indiana University, USA Live Streamed on October 9, 2016 @ 1:30 pm EST Professor Kara holds PhDs in Linguistics from the ELTE University of Budapest, Hungary and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, as well as his Doctor of Philology degree from Leningrad State University. Kara is currently a Professor of Central Eurasian Studies at Indiana University. His specialty is Mongol and Inner Asian studies and his research interests include languages and cultures (including Old Turkic, Tibetan, Manchu, Evenki, Khitan and Altaic philology), history of writing systems, Altaic linguistics, and Mongol literature and folklore. He has authored several books and many journal articles over his sixty year career. He has received the Order of the Polar Star of the Republic of Mongolia (1998), Alexander von Humboldt-Forschungspreis (1999), and the Order of Labor Merit of the Republic of Mongolia (2005) awards, and he is a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Professor Emeritus of ELTE University of Budapest, and awardee of IU’s gold medal for Altaic studies (2011).
	Marcel Erdal, Professor, Department of Turcology, Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany Live Streamed on October 8, 2016 @ 4:30 pm EST Professor Erdal is a graduate of Robert College, Istanbul. He studied linguistics in Jerusalem with Hansjakob Polotsky, then Turkic and Altaic studies in Copenhagen with Kaare Thomsen Hansen. He was the head of the Turcology department at Goethe University, Frankfurt-am-Main and has more recently taught in Nicosia, Cyprus, at the Central Minorities University in Beijing and at Hacettepe University in Ankara. He has worked with Bazin (Paris), Doerfer (Goettingen), Johanson (Mainz) and Schönig (Berlin). He is a honorary member of the Türk Dil Kurumu and a member of the supervising committee of Turfanforschung at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences. His publications include Old Turkic Word Formation: A Functional Approach to the Lexicon (1991) and A Grammar of Old Turkic (2004). He has extensively published on Turkish morphology and been engaged in field work on endangered South Siberian Turkic varieties, editing, with colleagues, the Handbuch des Tschalkantürkischen (vol. 1, 2013).

There will also be a number of other invited speakers, selected among linguists working on Central Asian languages and linguistics.