Margaret Kahn

Margaret Kahn (pen name, Margy Kahn) is an internationally known American writer and linguist. She is the author of Children of the Jinn: In Search of the Kurds and Their Country, first published by Seaview Books in 1980 with a second updated edition issued in 2020. She is also the author of Borrowing and Variation in a Phonological Description of Kurdish. She wrote the entry on Kurds in The Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups. Her articles on phonetics and phonology have appeared in a number of academic journals, and her short stories have been published both in literary journals and popular magazines. Her plays have been produced at theaters in California and Maryland. Education and academic work Born in New York City, Kahn went to Barnard College where she graduated cum laude with a major in linguistics and a minor in writing. Upon graduation she was offered an NDEA fellowship to the linguistics department at the University of Michigan where she took courses in Arabic as well as theoretical linguistics. She was among the first scholars to study gender differences in language. In graduate school in Ann Arbor, she studied articulatory phonetics with J.C. Catford. She also worked at one of the first women's crisis centers in the country. After receiving a master's degree in linguistics, she went to Iran where she taught English as a second language at Rezaiyeh Agricultural College in the city now known as Urmia, and pursued field research on Kurdish. After receiving her Ph.D. in theoretical linguistics from the University of Michigan, she became a Research Affiliate in the speech communication group of the Research Lab of Electronics at MIT where she helped author several papers on the phonetics of Persian and taught briefly at Boston and Tufts Universities. In 1978, she took a position as a lecturer in the Department of Acoustics at Alexandria University in Egypt where she taught Arabic phonetics. Speech engineering