Tanya Karoli Christensen

Tanya Karoli Christensen is a professor of Danish language at the University of Copenhagen, with a PhD from Roskilde University. Her research is centred on the relationship between language system and language use, where she has worked both theoretically and empirically with grammatical structure and variation. Methodologically, she often combines quantitative studies with in-depth qualitative analyses of examples of language use in context.

Her interest in grammatical structure is most strongly expressed in her PhD dissertation on Hyperparadigms from 2007, which examines the interaction of grammatical categories. She has pursued her interest in grammatical variation through programmes of study of positional differences in Danish spoken language, as seen in the anthology Explanations in Sociosyntactic Variation from 2022.

In recent years, Tanya Karoli Christensen has specialised in the field of forensic linguistics, which examines the relationship between language and law, including how language is used in criminal contexts. As head of the research project Language and Genre of Threats, she has studied how senders portray themselves and their recipients in written Danish threat messages. Her research on threats has led to studies of the language of hate speech and terrorist manifestos.

Tanya Karoli Christensen regularly assists police and lawyers with expert knowledge in cases involving linguistic evidence, and she lectures and disseminates widely on forensic linguistics, for example at LEX. In spring 2026, she will release the podcast Ordet fanger, supported by the Carlsberg Foundation.