People
Staff
Zachary O’Hagan (Manager) received his PhD in linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley in 2020, with a dissertation titled Focus in Caquinte, an Arawakan language of Peru. His research centers on the documentation of Amazonian indigenous languages, on the people who speak them, and their history and culture. He is a generalist and arealist, with theoretical interests in morphosyntax, semantics, information structure, and historical linguistics. Since 2010 he has carried out fieldwork in Peru on Caquinte, Chamikuro, and Resígaro (Arawakan), Omagua (Tupí-Guaraní), Taushiro (isolate), Urarina (isolate), and Omurano (isolate). In 2019 he edited Tsabetsatsarentsipae itionkantajitakaroka igenketsatsare kakinte, a monolingual volume of stories in Caquinte.
Ronald Sprouse (IT Specialist) has worked as a linguist and programmer on a number of language documentation projects in addition to his work with the Survey. He served as Technical Director of the Ingush and Chechen projects that resulted in the publication of two dictionaries; in support of these projects he conducted fieldwork with Ingush and Chechen consultants, worked on lexical databases, and created a web-based system for collecting and annotating interlinear text. He was also a significant contributor to the Turkish Electronic Living Lexicon project, a lexical database of transcribed audio recordings for studying Turkish morphophonemics, for which he created a web-based search interface and tools for investigating the statistical properties of morphophonemic alternations in the data.
Tzintia Montaño Ramírez (Assistant; Graduate Student, Linguistics) is interested in language revitalization, documentation, and fieldwork. Her work focuses on Mixtecan languages, specially Da’an Davi (Southern Puebla Mixtec, Mexico). Her most recent research studied language ideologies among the Mixtec diaspora community from Puebla and New York. Since then, she has been interested in developing a language documentation project oriented toward create teaching materials for revitalization efforts.
Priyanka Samant (Assistant; Undergraduate Student, Linguistics) is primarily interested in language revitalization and preservation efforts. She has processed and worked with language materials from several collections, including, but not limited to those related to indigenous languages of the Americas and sub-Saharan Africa. Her personal research focuses on acoustic and theoretical phonetics.
Andrew Garrett (Director) is Professor of Linguistics and Nadine M. Tang and Bruce L. Smith Professor of Cross-Cultural Social Sciences. As a Californianist he has done linguistic fieldwork, archival work, and consulting work with the Hupa, Karuk, Northern Paiute, Rumsen Ohlone, and Sierra Miwok languages, but he mainly focuses on Yurok and Karuk (in northern California). His Yurok projects include articles on descriptive and historical linguistics, contributions to the tribal language program (including a practical dictionary compiled with Juliette Blevins and Lisa Conathan), ongoing work on Yurok texts, and a digital text and lexical archive. In Yurok grammar, Garrett is especially interested in relations between lexical and morphological structures on the one hand, and between lexical and syntactic patterns on the other; his book Basic Yurok appeared in 2014. His Karuk projects, in collaboration with Line Mikkelsen and several graduate students, include a database of texts, research on the language’s interesting syntactic patterns, and a co-edited volume of ten texts recorded in 1901 and 1902. More generally, he studies the dialectology of languages of the west coast and the emergence of the distinctive California linguistic profile. Outside California, Garrett also worked on Indo-European historical linguistics, especially Anatolian, Greek, and Latin, and general problems of language change and linguistic reconstruction.
Affiliates
Nicolas Arms (Graduate Student, Anthropology) is a PhD candidate with interests spanning the ethnography, linguistics, and historical ecology of the North American Southwest. His dissertation is a study of oral culture and human-environment relationships among the Comcaac or Seri people of coastal Sonora, based on a combination of archival research and long-term fieldwork in the Seri-speaking community of Haxöl Iihom or El Desemboque del Río San Ignacio. He is also currently at work on a community-oriented volume of Seri-language texts transcribed from oral performances by Comcaac storytellers, and a crosslinguistic study of Indigenous plant names in the greater Sonoran Desert region.
Christine Beier (Research Linguist, Linguistics) dedicates her research and field activities to the documentation, description, revitalization, and revalorization of small and endangered languages, primarily in Peruvian Amazonia. She is particularly interested in the social life of language, including factors affecting language vitality; the intersection of linguistics and scholarship with language-community service; text-driven description and analysis; and working to bring data from Amazonian languages to bear on questions in typology and tonology. Thus far, she has worked with inheritors and speakers of Andoa (also: Katsakáti; Zaparoan), Aʔiwa (isolate), Chamikuro (Arawakan), Iquito (also: Ikíìtù; Zaparoan), Matsigenka (Arawak), Máíhĩ̀kì (also: Orejón, Tukanoan), Nanti (Arawak), Muniche (isolate), Omagua (Tupí-Guaraní), and Záparo (also: Sápara; Zaparoan).
Chase Boles (Graduate Student, Linguistics) is primarily interested in morphosyntax and semantics, their typologies, and language documentation and revitalization. He primarily investigates these through the lens of fieldwork with speakers of Kanien’kéha (Mohawk), an Iroquoian language of the Northeast. He is particularly interested in how to bridge the gap between formalism and pedagogy in order to document advanced phenomena and make it accessible for learners, having aided elders in the creation of teaching materials.
Amy Rose Deal (Professor of Linguistics) has worked for many years with speakers of Nez Perce, a Sahaptian language of the Columbia River plateau. Her interests are broadly in linguistic universals and variation as they relate to syntax and semantics, and ways that formal tools can be brought to bear to better understand linguistic phenomena. Particular interests include case and agreement; attitude reports; perspectival phenomena, especially indexical shift; possessor raising; and mass/count distinctions.
Leanne Hinton (Director Emerita; Professor Emerita of Linguistics) specializes in endangered languages and language revitalization, especially for American Indian languages. She is one of the founders and an advisory board member for the Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival, and a co-designer of their two main programs, the Master-Apprentice Language Learning Program (MAP), and the Breath of Life archival workshops and institutes for indigenous language recovery, in Berkeley and Washington D.C. (BOL). Her books include Flutes of Fire: Essays on California Indian Languages (Heyday Books, 1994), The Green Book of Language Revitalization in Practice (ed. with Ken Hale, Academic Press, 2001), How to Keep Your Language Alive: A commonsense approach to one-on-one language learning (Heyday Books, 2002), and Bringing Our Languages Home: Language revitalization for Families (Heyday Books, 2013). Her most recent book is The Routledge Handbook of Language Revitalization (co-edited with Leena Huss and Gerald Roche, 2018). Hinton consults around the world for tribes and organizations doing language revitalization.
Tyler Lee-Wynant (Graduate Student, Linguistics) works on California Indigenous languages with a focus on the Pomoan languages and Hupa (Pacific Coast Dene). He is involved in projects which process archived language documentation for the development of machine-readable resources (e.g., online dictionaries, text corpora, content indexes). His current projects are: developing a Northern Pomo (his heritage language) language course, directing an Eastern Pomo dictionary/text corpus project, and conducting fieldwork on Hupa. His research interests include morphosyntax, fieldwork, documentation, language reawakening, and the synergism between these.
Anna Macknick’s (Graduate Student, Linguistics) work focuses on language reclamation, dialectal variation, and morphology. They are working with Robert Geary (Elem Pomo) on building an online dictionary of Xaitsnue (Southeastern Pomo), along with other community-oriented language materials, to support language learners. Anna has also worked on Northern New Mexican Spanish, their heritage language, primarily with archival materials from UNM’s Center for Southwest Research.
Wendy L.A. López Márquez (Graduate Student, Linguistics) ′iyooxaka′aba Mixe-Zoque ′angmaatyiyaj. Je′m ′ingmaatyi Nuntajɨɨyi (Zoque ′angmaatyi) je′am je′m maj ′iyooxakanewɨ′ɨp. ′Ikusunɨ′yba language documentation, ′ikusunɨ′ybatyim morphosyntax. Sɨ′p sɨ′ ′ikuyujka′ relative clauses ′ingmatyiimɨ′. ′Ikupadɨgɨ′yñe′um ′iga ′ingmaatyi ′ini′ity relative clauses kobagɨ′yyajwɨpɨ′k, dyapɨ′k kobagɨ′yyajwɨ′ɨp, ′i je′m kobagɨ′yyajwɨpɨ′k ′ijojmɨ′.
Lev Michael (Professor of Linguistics) carries out ethnographically-informed linguistic research in several communities in Peruvian and Ecuadorean Amazonia, and has worked with speakers of with speakers of Andoa (Zaparoan), Aʔɨwa (isolate), Iquito (Zaparoan), Kashibo-Kakataibo (Panoan), Máíhĩ̵̀kì (Tukanoan), Matsigenka (Arawak), Muniche (isolate), Nanti (Arawak), Omagua (Tupí-Guaraní based contact language), and Záparo (Zaparoan). As an anthropological linguist, his interests include the social instrumentality of deictic evidential categories (especially evidentiality), the formal structure and social function of verbal art, language contact and historical linguistics in Amazonia, language typology, language documentation and grammatical description, and the practice and politics of language revitalization. His blog on Amazonian languages and societies can be found here.
Line Mikkelsen (Professor of Linguistics) has a long-standing interest in indigenous languages of California. She works with Karuk language teacher Florrine Super to develop language teaching and learning materials for Karuk. Over the last decade this work has expanded to include annual campus visits by Florrine and highschool Karuk language students to do classroom presentations on Karuk language and culture. These presentations are part of a broader get-ready-for-college program for the visits. Line has also worked with Vincent Medina, Louis Trevino and language learners and activists to keep Chochenyo, the first language of the East Bay, strong. Most recently, she has developed an interest in Kalaallisut, the official language of Greenland. She is collaborating with Kalaallisut speakers Ellen Thrane and Grethe Schmidt on a variety of grammatical topics, as well as a UC Berkeley course on the history, structure, and sociolinguistics of Kalaallisut. She gratefully acknowledges the guidance of native-speaker linguist Naja Blytmann Trondhjem in this work.
Beth H. Piatote (Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and English) is affiliated faculty in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of two award-winning books: a scholarly monograph, Domestic Subjects: Gender, Citizenship, and Law in Native American Literature (Yale 2013); and a mixed-genre collection, The Beadworkers: Stories (Counterpoint 2019). She has published numerous scholarly articles, short stories, poems, and plays in journals and anthologies. Her research interests include Native American/Indigenous Literature, law, and culture; Nez Perce literature and language; Indigenous Language Revitalization; and creative writing. She is currently the chair of the Designated Emphasis in Indigenous Language Revitalization. She is Nez Perce, enrolled with the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, and works on various Nez Perce language projects with fellow tribal members at Lapwai, ID; Nespelem, WA; Pendleton, OR; and elsewhere. She is a founding member of luk’upsíimey/North Star Collective, a Nez Perce group dedicated to language revitalization through the arts.
Richard Rhodes (Professor Emeritus of Linguistics) conducts research on topics relating to American Indian languages, particularly those of the Algonquian family, including bringing insights gained in fieldwork to bear on typology and on analytic issues in better studied languages. He has done extensive fieldwork on the Ottawa dialect of Ojibwe which is spoken in Michigan and southern Ontario, and on Métchif, a language of the northern plains consisting of French and Cree elements. He has also done fieldwork on Sayula Popoluca, a Mixe-Zoquean language of southern Mexico. His most important work is the Eastern Ojibwe-Chippewa-Ottawa Dictionary which incorporates two dialects of Ojibwe. He has written extensively on the syntax of Ojibwe, on topics of Ojibwe ethnohistory, and on the lexicography of American Indian languages.
Tanner Scott is interested mainly in historical linguistics, language documentation, and language revitalization. He focuses on the Iroquoian language family, especially Cherokee, his heritage language. He is involved in projects that study historical Cherokee syllabary texts, and his interests within Cherokee include dialect variation, philological study of Cherokee-language documents, sound change, and tones.
Alan C. L. Yu (Chancellor’s Professor of Linguistics) directs the Phonology Laboratory and the Washo Documentation Project. His work on Wáˑšiw (Washo), a language spoken in the Lake Tahoe region of California and Nevada, focuses mainly on the phonetics, phonology, and morphology of the language.