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Curriculum Vitae

Specialties

• I specialize in the documentation, description, and history of the Eskimo-Aleut languages, especially in the areas of morphosyntax, discourse, typology, and prehistoric language contact.  I have worked with communities in Russia, Alaska, Eastern Canada, and Greenland, although my focus has been on Unangam Tunuu. As it is Unangam Tunuu is currently highly endangered, my work has included being actively engaged in language maintenance and revitalization activities, and on the long-term archival preservation of the results of documentation.  
  
  Key specialties:  Documentation and description, Eskimo-Aleut, language contact in prehistory, morphosyntax and typology, language maintenance and revitalization, language archiving.
  

Classes Taught

• I teach classes in the following subjects at both undergraduate and graduate levels:  Morphology, Semantics, Field Methods, Community Language Documentation Language Contact, Language Contact in Prehistory (focusing on the North Pacific Coast), Eskimo-Aleut Linguistics, Unangax̂ Language and Culture, and Documentation and Archives.

Current Research

• Language Contact in Prehistory along the North Pacific Coast: My current focus is in understanding the nature of the historical development of Unangam Tunuu, its divergence from the Eskimoan branch of the family, and the factors that encouraged this divergence.  This work is highly multidisciplinary, and involves results from the fields of linguistics, archaeology, genetics, paleo-environmental studies, and ethnohistory, and the geographical area that includes the current homelands of the Unangan, Sugpiat, Dena’ina, Eyak, and Tlingit. 

Publications

Articles

• , Language Dispersal Beyond Farming
• , Linguistic Discovery
• , Proceedings of the 14th Inuit Studies Conference 
•  Dynamics of Insubordination
• Divine Inspiration.  Revue Amerindia
• Polysynthesis in Aleut (Unangam Tunuu).  Linguistic Typology of the North 3
• Object Reduction in Aleut.  Asian and African Languages and Linguistics 7: Transitivity and Its Related Phenomena
• Adequacy in Documentation.  Language Documentation:  Practice and Values
• Unexpected Non-Anaphoric Marking in Aleut.  Rara & Rarissima: Documenting the fringes of linguistic diversity
•  Journal of Historical Linguistics
• Reexamining the Linguistic Prehistory of Aleut (Unangam Tunuu). Digging For Words: Archaeolinguistic Case Studies from the XV Nordic TAG Conference Held at the University of Copenhagen
• Subsistence Terms in Unangam Tunuu (Aleut).  Language Dispersal Beyond Farming
• Origins of Linguistic Diversity in the Aleutian Islands.  Human Biology

Lillian Maassen grew up in Anchorage and received her M.Phil in Linguistics from Trinity College Dublin in 2019. Her dissertation research focused on the vowel system of a little-spoken Irish English dialect. She has a background in Communications and nonprofit work, and her interests include phonology, sociolinguistics, and Indigenous language revitalization. 

Born, raised and educated in Berkeley, California, Steven A. Jacobson earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in mathematics at the University of California. Later, he studied Central Yup'ik Eskimo with the late Irene Reed at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, and learned much from his wife, Anna, a native speaker, and a writer of the language. Jacobson extended his studies to include Siberian and Naukan Yupik, and comparative Eskimo, with interests in the lexicon, grammar, dialectology, and literature of these languages. He taught university classes in Central Yup'ik for many years, and occasionally in Siberian Yupik, and is the author, co-author, compiler, or editor of a number of dictionaries, grammars, and other studies of the languages.

Curriculum Vitae

Publications

 

 

Lawrence Kaplan is professor emeritus of Linguistics and director of the Alaska Native Language Center from 2000 to 2018. He has taught courses in Linguistics, such as Introduction to Phonetics and Phonology, Historical Linguistics, and Language Policy and Planning, and also works as a linguist with the Inupiaq Eskimo language, which is spoken in northern Alaska.

Kaplan is compiling dictionaries of Inupiaq as well as working on texts and grammatical explanations for the language. He is also involved with training Inupiaq language and culture instructors and works with programs in Native Language Education that offer degrees intended to prepare Native language teachers from Alaska and Yukon Territory in Canada.

Publications

James Kari retired from ANLC in 1997 but continues to work on several Alaska Native language projects. In the past thirty-five years, he has done extensive linguistic work in many Athabascan languages, including Ahtna, Dena'ina, Koyukon, Deg Hit'an, Holikachuk, Tanana, and Upper Tanana.

Curriculum Vitae

Publications

 

Jeff Leer's commitment to Alaska Native languages began at age seven when he started to study Tlingit in his hometown, Juneau. In 1973 he became a linguist and teacher at ANLC, and in 1991 he completed his Ph.D. dissertation, The Schetic Categories of the Tlingit Verb, at the University of Chicago. He learned to speak both Tlingit and Alutiiq, and he has done extensive linguistic work in other languages, as well as in the field of comparative Athabascan-Eyak-Tlingit.

Publications 

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Hishinlai’ received her Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics in 2019. Her research and interests are on Indigenous language learning and teaching, second language acquisition, identity, sociocultural theory, and activity theory. She has worked extensively with Indigenous groups (Athabascan, Haida, Tlingit, Alutiiq, Inupiaq, Yup’ik and Aleut) throughout Alaska and Canada.

André Bourcier has been with the  in Whitehorse, Yukon for 15 years before becoming Acting Director in September 2015. His worked previously many years as a consultant in Linguistics and Language Planning for the Gwich'in and the Inuvialuit of the Northwest Territories.

He received a Ph.D. in Linguistics from Université Laval where his doctoral studies were supported through a Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada scholarship.

Perry Gilmore, Ph.D. (University of Pennsylvania 1982), a sociolinguist and educational anthropologist, is professor emerita at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and professor of Language, Reading and Culture (LRC) and Second Language Acquisition and Teaching (SLAT) faculty at the University of Arizona. She has conducted communication, language, and literacy research in a wide variety of urban and rural settings in the United States, Russia, Africa and Australia. Interest in language and communication has led her to explore a wide range of questions on the origin, nature, and development of interaction and communication, including: field studies of non-human primate communication in the West Indies and East Africa, pidginization and creolization of languages, social aspects of literacy acquisition, and Indigenous language and culture regenesis.

She is the author of numerous ethnographic studies and co-editor of several major ethnography collections, including Children In and Out of School: Ethnography and Education, The Acquisition of Literacy: Ethnographic Perspectives, and Indigenous Epistemologies and Education: Self-Determination, Anthropology and Human Rights. Gilmore is a past president of the Council on Anthropology and Education.

As a Professor of Linguistics and Alaska Native Languages, documentary linguist, Gary has conducted firsthand fieldwork Dene (Athabascan) languages of Alaska and Papuan languages in eastern Indonesia. His publications include a grammar of the Tobelo language, dictionaries of Western Pantar and Tanacross, and numerous papers describing the structure of these languages. Current projects include research on  and the .

Gary holds a B.S. degree from UAF and a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Alessandro Jaker is a phonologist and descriptive linguist, specializing in two Dene (Athabaskan) languages spoken in and around Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada: Wıı̀lıı̀deh Yatıı̀, a dialect of the Tłı̨chǫ (Dogrib) language (ethnologue: DGR) and Tetsǫ́t'ıné Yatıé (Yellowknife), a dialect of the Dëne Sųłıné (Chipewyan) language (ethnologue: CHP). He is currently working on a verb grammar of Tetsǫ́t'ıné, funded by an NSF/NEH Documenting Endangered Languages fellowship, to be published through ANLC.

Alex received his PhD in linguistics from Stanford University in 2012 and was a postdoctoral fellow at ANLC from 2013 to 2015, as part of the NSF Polar Postdoc Program.

John Ritter is the founding director of the  in Whitehorse. John documents and describes Yukon aboriginal languages, and he participates in the training of Native language instructors and specialists. He is particularly interested in place names and serves on the Yukon Geographical Place Names Board.

Alice Taff works to foster Alaskan language continuity by engaging community members to document language, re-establish situations for language use, and create materials in their languages. Examples of materials are:

• Deg Xinag (Deg Hitʼan, Ingalik Athabascan) --  Deg Xinag narratives
• Tlingit --  Tlingit Conversations
•  (Aleut language)

Taff earned her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Washington in 1999. She is immediate past president of the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas. Her current research interest is finding links between ancestral Indigenous language use and health.

 

Publications