• Medieval language contact
• Historical sociolinguistics
• (Second) language acquisition in the Middle Ages
• Historical syntax
• Old English
• Middle English
• Medieval Latin

2011- Professor of English historical linguistics, English department,
University of Zurich

2010-2011 Postdoctoral researcher, Research Unit for Variation, Contacts and Change in English (VARIENG), Department of English, University of Helsinki

2010 Ph.D. in English philology, University of Helsinki
Eximia cum laude

2005 candidate of sciences in philology, St. Petersburg State University

1998 M.A. in English philology, St. Petersburg State University

For drafts and pre-prints, see: https://uzh.academia.edu/OlgaTimofeeva

Timofeeva, Olga (2022). Sociolinguistic Variation in Old English: Records of Communities and People. Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics 13. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://benjamins.com/catalog/ahs.13

• Reviewed by Bev Thurber, LinguistList: 34.688
• Reviewed by Jessica Kantarovich, Language in Society 53 (2023): https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404523000568
• Reviewed by Christine Wallis, Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics 9/2 (2023): https://doi.org/10.1515/jhsl-2022-0026

Timofeeva, Olga (2010). Non-finite Constructions in Old English, with Special Reference to Syntactic Borrowing from Latin, PhD dissertation, Mémoires de la Société Néophilologique de Helsinki, vol. LXXX, Helsinki: Société Néophilologique.

Timofeeva, Olga (2006). Latinskie sintaksicheskie zaimstvovania v drevneanglijskom jazyke (‘Latin syntactic borrowing in Old English’), Candidate of Sciences in Philology dissertation, St. Petersburg: Gelikon Plus.

Timofeeva, Olga (in preparation). “Standardising processes in the religious discourse of Middle English.”

Timofeeva, Olga (in preparation). “Disinherited protagonists in the early history of T/V variation in Middle English.”

Dominique Mühlebach and Olga Timofeeva (accepted). “Four Old English Legal Texts in a Gospel-Book. Bern, Burgerbibliothek, Cod. 671, fol. 75v‒76v,” in Old English in Switzerland, ed. by Annina Seiler and Nicole Studer-Joho.

Timofeeva, Olga (accepted). “A visual and linguistic interpretation of the Pater Noster table of the Vernon Manuscript,” in Graphic Practices and Literacies in the History of English, ed. by Matti Peikola, Jukka Tyrkkö and Mari-Liisa Varila. Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy. Brepols.

Timofeeva, Olga (in press). “Classical languages in the early history of English,” in New Cambridge History of the English Language, vol. 1, ed. by Laura Wright and Raymond Hickey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Timofeeva, Olga & Leena Kahlas-Tarkka (fc 2025). “yet ar ye not lyche, for thu art a fals strumpet: Pronominal terms of address in The Book of Margery Kempe.” Journal of Historical Pragmatics.

Timofeeva, Olga (fc 2024). “Low German in The Book of Margery Kempe,” Poetica.

Timofeeva, Olga & Jonas Keller (2023). “Multilingual encounters in The Book of Margery Kempe,” Etudes Médiévales Anglaises 102: 11–42.

Timofeeva, Olga (2023). “Ludwig in Anglo-Saxon sources,” in Swe gameliþ is: Studien zur vergleichenden germanischen Sprachwissenschaft: Festschrift für Ludwig Rübekeil zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. by Mirjam Marti Heinzle and Luzius Thöny, 121–131. Heidelberg: Winter.

Timofeeva, Olga (2022a). “The art of dying: Making a will in Old English and its sociolinguistic context." Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 57: 109–129. https://doi.org/10.2478/stap-2022-0005

Timofeeva, Olga (2022b). “Royal chancery after 1066: Lexical choice, change and negotiation.” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 123(2): 32–60. https://doi.org/10.51814/nm.119516

Timofeeva, Olga (2022c). Review of Mary Kate Hurley (2021), Translation Effects: Language, Time, and Community in Medieval England. Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies 33(2): 273–276. https://angl.winter-verlag.de/data/article/11217/pdf/92202023.pdf

Timofeeva, Olga (2021). Review of Shana Poplack (2018), Borrowing: Loanwords in the Speech Community and in the Grammar; English World-Wide 42(2): 237–241. https://doi.org/10.1075/eww.00068.tim

Timofeeva, Olga (2020a). “Nithe and onde, þat is here broþer: The lexicalisation of a Middle English binominal.” Of ye Olde English Langage and Textes: New Perspectives on Old and Middle English Language and Literature, ed. by Rodrigo Pérez Lorido, Carlos Prado Alonso, and Paula Rodríguez-Puente, 51–80. Berlin: Peter Lang.

Timofeeva, Olga (2020b). “On the margins of Bible translation: English decalogues and their circulation in the thirteenth-fourteenth centuries.” Aevum 94(2): 317–340. http://digital.casalini.it/10.26350/000193_000073

Timofeeva, Olga (2019). “Chancery norms before Chancery English: Templates in royal writs from Alfred the Great to William the Conqueror.” Journal of Historical Pragmatics 20(1): 51–77. https://doi.org/10.1075/jhp.16004.tim

Timofeeva, Olga (2018a). “AELFRED MEC HEHT GEWYRCAN: Sociolinguistic concepts in the study of Alfredian English.” English Language and Linguistics 22(1): 123–48. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1360674316000435

Timofeeva, Olga (2018b). “Mid ðare soðe luue ðe is icleped karite: Pastoral care and lexical innovation in the thirteenth century.” Journal of the Spanish Society for Medieval English Language and Literature (SELIM) 23: 55–85. https://reunido.uniovi.es/index.php/SELIM/article/view/13297

Timofeeva, Olga (2018c). “Survival and loss of Old English religious vocabulary between 1150 and 1350.” English Language and Linguistics 22(2): 225–47. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1360674318000114

Timofeeva, Olga and Ingham, Richard (2018). “Special issue on mechanisms of French contact influence in Middle English: Diffusion and maintenance.” English Language and Linguistics 22(2): 197–205. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1360674318000096

Timofeeva, Olga (2017a). “Cum saca et soca, et tol et theam: The status of English terminology in Latin acta of William the Conqueror.” Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch 52(2): 195–215.

Timofeeva, Olga (2017b). “Lexical Loans and Their Diffusion in Old English: Of ‘gospels’, ‘martyrs’, and ‘teachers’.” Studia Neophilologica 89(2): 215–237.

Timofeeva, Olga (2016a). “Alfredian Press on the Vikings: Critical Discourse Approach to Outgroup Construction,” Journal of English Linguistics 44(3): 230–253. http://doi.org/10.1177/0075424216654210

Timofeeva, Olga (2016b). "Bide nu æt Gode þæt ic grecisc cunne: Attitudes to Greek and the Greeks in the Anglo-Saxon period." Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 51(2): 5–29. https://doi.org/10.1515/stap-2016-0007

Timofeeva, Olga (2016c). “The Viking outgroup in early medieval English chronicles,” Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics 2(1): 83–121. https://doi.org/10.1515/jhsl-2016-0004

Timofeeva, Olga (2013a). "Anglo-Latin and Old English: A Case for Integrated Bilingual Corpus Studies of Anglo-Saxon Registers." in New Methods in Historical Corpora, ed. by Paul Bennett, Martin Durrell, Silke Scheible, and Richard J. Whitt, 195–204. Corpus Linguistics and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Language, vol. 3. Tübingen: Narr.

Timofeeva, Olga (2013b). “Hearsay and Lexical Evidentials in Old Germanic Languages, With Focus on Old English,” in Comparative Studies in Early Germanic Languages: With a Focus on Verbal Categories, ed. by Gabriele Diewald, Leena Kahlas-Tarkka, and Ilse Wischer, 169–194. Studies in Language Companion Series 138. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Timofeeva, Olga (2013c). “Latin Loans in Old English and Finnish Loans in Modern English: Can We Distinguish Statistics from Myth?” in Selected Proceedings of the 2012 Symposium on New Approaches in English Historical Lexis (HEL-LEX3), ed. by R.W. McConchie, Teo Juvonen, Mark Kaunisto, Minna Nevala, and Jukka Tyrkkö. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project. http://www.lingref.com/cpp/hel-lex/2012/abstract2845.html/

Timofeeva, Olga (2013d). “Of ledenum bocum to engliscum gereorde: Bilingual Communities of Practice in Anglo-Saxon England,” in Communities of Practice in the History of English, ed. by Joanna Kopaczyk and Andreas H. Jucker, 201–224. Pragmatics and Beyond New Series 235. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Timofeeva, Olga (2013e). "The Wor(l)ds of Kalevala: Finnish Lexical Loans in Modern English," in Ex Philologia Lux: Essays in Honour of Leena Kahlas-Tarkka, ed. by Jukka Tyrkkö, Olga Timofeeva, and Maria Salenius, 159–185. Mémoires de la Société Néophilologique XC. Helsinki: Société Néophilologique.

Timofeeva, Olga (2013f). Review of Janie Steen (2008), Verse and Virtuosity: The Adaptation of Latin Rhetoric in Old English Poetry; Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 2013(1): 125–128. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43344605

Timofeeva, Olga (2012). “Latin Absolute Constructions and Their Old English Equivalents: Interfaces between Form and Information Structure,” in Information Structure and Syntactic Change in the History of English, ed. by Anneli Meurman-Solin, María José López-Couso, and Bettelou Los, Oxford Studies in the History of English, 228–42. New York: Oxford University Press.

Timofeeva, Olga (2011a). “Battlefield Victory: Lexical Transfer in Medieval Anglo-Latin,” in Multilingual Discourse Production: Diachronic and Synchronic Perspectives, ed. by Svenja Kranich, Viktor Becher, Steffen Höder, and Juliane House, 109–32. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Timofeeva, Olga (2011b). “Infinitival Complements with the Verb (ge)don in Old English: Latin Influence Revisited,” in Leeds Studies in English 42: 93–108.

Timofeeva, Olga (2011c). Review of Kiriko Sato (2009), The Development from Case-Forms to Prepositional Constructions in Old English Prose; Leeds Studies in English 42: 122–123.

Kilpiö, Matti and Timofeeva, Olga (2011). “Semantic Polyfunctionality and Grammaticalization of the OE Subordinator be þæm þe: a corpus-based study,” in Typology of Adverbial Connectives, ed. by Anneli Meurman-Solin and Ursula Lenker, Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English, VARIENG ePublications. http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/journal/volumes/08/kilpio_timofeeva/

Timofeeva, Olga (2010a). “Anglo-Latin Bilingualism before 1066: Prospects and Limitations,” in Interfaces between Language and Culture in Medieval England: A Festschrift for Matti Kilpiö, ed. by Alaric Hall, Olga Timofeeva, Ágnes Kiricsi, and Bethany Fox, 1–36. Leiden: Brill.

Timofeeva, Olga (2010b). “Non-finite Constructions in Old English, with Special Reference to Syntactic Borrowing from Latin: Lectio praecursoria,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 2010(4): 503–507. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43344710

Timofeeva, Olga (2009). Nicole Guenther Discenza (2005), The King’s English: Strategies of Translation in the Old English Boethius; Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 2009(2): 251–254. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43344414

Timofeeva, Olga (2008). “Translating the Texts where Et Verborum Ordo Mysterium Est: Late Old English Idiom vs. Ablativus Absolutus,” Journal of Medieval Latin 18: 216–228.

Timofeeva, Olga (2006a). “Word be worde – andgit of andgite: A Study of the Medieval Rhetorical Formula,” in Selected Proceedings of the 2005 Symposium on New Approaches in English Historical Lexis (HEL-LEX), ed. R.W. McConchie et al., pp. 135–142. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project. www.lingref.com, document #1354.

Timofeeva, Olga (2006b). Review of Robert Hasenfratz and Thomas Jambeck (2005), Reading Old English: A Primer and First Reader; Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 2006(3): 378–379. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43344241

(2021) Words, Books, Images, and the Long Eighteenth Century: Essays for Allen Reddick, ed. by Antoinina Bevan Zlatar, Mark Ittensohn, Enit K. Steiner, and Olga Timofeeva. FILLM Studies in Languages and Literature 16. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

(2018) Mechanisms of French contact influence in Middle English: Diffusion and maintenance, ed. by Olga Timofeeva and Richard Ingham. Special issue of English Language and Linguistics 22(2). https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/english-language-and-linguistics/issue/EB7935A7824369FEEBC63681FEC5C6A9

(2017) What is an Image in Medieval and Early Modern England? (Proceedings of the 5th Conference of the Swiss Association of Medieval and Early Modern English Studies, Zurich, 9-11th September 2016), SPELL 34, ed. by Antoinina Bevan Zlatar and Olga Timofeeva. Tübingen: Narr.

(2016) New Approaches in English Linguistics: Building Bridges, ed. by Olga Timofeeva, Sarah Chevalier, Anne-Christine Gardner, and Alpo Honkapohja. Studies in Language Companion Series 177. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

(2014) Contact, Variation, and Change in the History of English, ed. by Simone E. Pfenninger, Olga Timofeeva, Anne-Christine Gardner, Alpo Honkapohja, Marianne Hundt, and Daniel Schreier. Studies in Language Companion Series 159. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

(2013) Ex Philologia Lux: Essays in Honour of Leena Kahlas-Tarkka, ed. by Jukka Tyrkkö, Olga Timofeeva, and Maria Salenius. Mémoires de la Société Néophilologique XC. Helsinki: Société Néophilologique.

(2011) Words in Dictionaries and History: Papers in Honour of R. W. McConchie, ed. by Olga Timofeeva and Tanja Säily, Terminology and Lexicography Research and Practice 14, Amsterdam: Benjamins.

(2010) Interfaces between Language and Culture in Medieval England: A Festschrift for Matti Kilpiö, ed. by Alaric Hall, Olga Timofeeva, Ágnes Kiricsi, and Bethany Fox, The Northern World 48, Leiden: Brill.

(2009) Anglo-Saxons and the North, Essays reflecting the theme of the 10th meeting of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists in Helsinki, 2001, ed. by Matti Kilpiö, Leena Kahlas-Tarkka, Jane Roberts, and Olga Timofeeva, Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.

(2008) Methods and the Medievalist: Current Approaches in Medieval Studies, ed. by Marko Lamberg, Jesse Keskiaho, Elina Räsänen and Olga Timofeeva, Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press.

(2006) Selected Proceedings of the 2005 Symposium on New Approaches in English Historical Lexis (HEL-LEX), ed. by R. W. McConchie, Olga Timofeeva, Heli Tissari, and Tanja Säily, Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Press.

Chevalier, Sarah, Gardner, Anne-Christine, Honkapohja, Alpo, Hundt, Marianne, Schneider, Gerold, & Timofeeva, Olga (2016). “Introduction,” in New Approaches in English Linguistics: Building Bridges, ed. by Olga Timofeeva, Sarah Chevalier, Anne-Christine Gardner, & Alpo Honkapohja, 1–12. Studies in Language Companion Series 177. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Pfenninger, Simone E., Timofeeva, Olga, Gardner, Anne-Christine, Honkapohja, Alpo, Hundt, Marianne & Schreier, Daniel (2014). “At the Crossroads of Language Change, Variation, and Contact,” in Contact, Variation, and Change in the History of English, ed. by Simone E. Pfenninger, Olga Timofeeva, Anne-Christine Gardner, Alpo Honkapohja, Marianne Hundt & Daniel Schreier, 1–7. Studies in Language Companion Series 159. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Timofeeva, Olga and Säily, Tanja (2011). “Introduction,” in Words in Dictionaries and History: Papers in Honour of R. W. McConchie, ed. by Olga Timofeeva and Tanja Säily, xiii–xvi. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Hall, Alaric, Timofeeva, Olga, Kiricsi, Ágnes, and Fox Bethany (2010). “Introduction,” in Interfaces between Language and Culture in Medieval England: A Festschrift for Matti Kilpiö, ed. by Alaric Hall, Olga Timofeeva, Ágnes Kiricsi & Bethany Fox, vi–xi. Leiden: Brill.