Dimitrios Meletis
University of Vienna
Dimitrios Meletis is a linguist specializing in grapholinguistics, the interdisciplinary study of writing and literacy. He holds a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Graz and is currently a postdoc researcher at the University of Vienna as well as a fellow of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. His previous research has been devoted to developing a comparative framework for describing the world’s diverse writing systems and has resulted in, among other things, broad definitions of central concepts such as ‘grapheme’ and ‘allography’. He sought to complement this descriptive framework with an interdisciplinary and usage-based explanatory theory to also explore the question of why writing systems are built the way they are built. The results were published in his open-access books ‘The Nature of Writing’ (Fluxus Editions, 2020) and, written together with Christa Dürscheid, ‘Writing Systems and Their Use’ (De Gruyter, 2022). His current project, titled 'Orthographic Relativity: Comparing Literacy and Normativity Across Writing Systems and Literate Cultures,' explores how literacy and the normative attitudes of language users influence each other.