Anna Wierzbicka is a Professor (Emerita) of Linguistics at the Australian National University, Canberra. Her work spans a number of disciplines, including anthropology, psychology, cognitive science, philosophy and religious studies as well as her home discipline of linguistics. Her latest books are "What Christians Believe: The Story of God and People in Minimal English" (OUP 2019), "Imprisoned in English" (OUP 2014), and "Words and Meanings" (with Cliff Goddard, OUP 2014). Together with Cliff Goddard, Wierzbicka created the “Natural Semantic Metalanguage”, based on the empirically established common core of all sampled natural languages. The central hypothesis is that this metalanguage corresponds to an innate and universal language (“Basic Human”) which can serve as a global lingua franca for communicating meanings and ideas. More recently, Anna and Cliff have developed Minimal English, an expanded, more elastic form of NSM for improved communication on all levels (see Cliff Goddard, ed., "Minimal English for a Global World" Palgrave 2018).
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