Meet Viveka Velupillai

BASED ON Shetland, Viveka Velupillai is a professor of linguistics who has studied languages including Hawai’i Creole and the Shetland dialect. She lives at Uradale Farm, the home of organic yarn company Uradale Yarns, and she has designed many knitting patterns using the brand’s organic native Shetland wools. Viveka’s patterns, such as her ‘Heather Blossom’ shawl, take inspiration from the knitting traditions of Shetland, as well as textile influences from her Swedish and Sri Lankan heritage. We chatted with Viveka about her adventures in linguistics and knitwear design.

Can you tell us about your professional work in linguistics?

“My MA is in Comparative Indo-European Linguistics (major) and Nordic Languages (minor) from the University of Uppsala, Sweden. Then, at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, I wrote my PhD on Hawai’i Creole, a so-called high contact language spoken as a mother tongue by about 700,000 people.

“As a typologist I am interested in the differences between and similarities of the languages of the world. Typologists also document and describe as many languages as possible. This is acutely needed, because languages are dying at an alarming rate - estimates are that about 50%