Colleen Fitzgerald | |
---|---|
Occupation | American linguist |
Academic background | |
Alma mater | University of Arizona |
Academic work | |
Institutions | North Dakota State University |
Main interests | Phonology,Language documentation,Language revitalization |
Colleen M. Fitzgerald is an American linguist who specializes in phonology,as well as language documentation and revitalization,especially with Native American languages. [1]
She earned her doctorate in linguistics in 1997 at the University of Arizona. [2] Her dissertation focused on prosody in Tohono O'odham,an Uto-Aztecan language. [3] She has published on Tohono O'odham,as well as other languages. Her other publications are on the topic of service learning in linguistics,including in indigenous language revitalization courses.
Fitzgerald is the Vice President for Research and Creative Activity at North Dakota State University. Previously she was Associate Vice President for research at Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi, [4] and Professor in the Department of Linguistics and TESOL [5] [6] the University of Texas at Arlington where she directed the Native American Languages Lab. [7] She formerly served as chair of the department. [8]
Fitzgerald served as Director of the 2014 Institute on Collaborative Research, [9] or CoLang 2014. [10] [11] This was the fourth iteration of this international training workshop in language documentation and revitalization. [12] With linguist Mary Linn,she co-directed the 2012 and 2014 Oklahoma Breath of Life Workshops. [13]
In 2021,Fitzgerald was inducted both as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and as Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America. [14] [15] In 2017 she was an invited plenary speaker at the Linguistic Society of America annual meeting,talking on,"The Sounds of Indigenous Language Revitalization." [16]
From 2015 to 2019 Fitzgerald served as the program director for the Documenting Endangered Languages program at the National Science Foundation. [17]
The Tohono Oʼodham are a Native American people of the Sonoran Desert,residing primarily in the U.S. state of Arizona and the northern Mexican state of Sonora. The federally recognized tribe is known in the United States as the Tohono Oʼodham Nation.
An endangered language or moribund language is a language that is at risk of disappearing as its speakers die out or shift to speaking other languages. Language loss occurs when the language has no more native speakers and becomes a "dead language". If no one can speak the language at all,it becomes an "extinct language". A dead language may still be studied through recordings or writings,but it is still dead or extinct unless there are fluent speakers. Although languages have always become extinct throughout human history,they are currently dying at an accelerated rate because of globalization,mass migration,cultural replacement,imperialism,neocolonialism and linguicide.
Linguistic anthropology is the interdisciplinary study of how language influences social life. It is a branch of anthropology that originated from the endeavor to document endangered languages and has grown over the past century to encompass most aspects of language structure and use.
Oʼodham or Papago-Pima is a Uto-Aztecan language of southern Arizona and northern Sonora,Mexico,where the Tohono Oʼodham and Akimel Oʼodham reside. In 2000 there were estimated to be approximately 9,750 speakers in the United States and Mexico combined,although there may be more due to underreporting.
Kenneth Locke Hale,also known as Ken Hale,was an American linguist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studied a huge variety of previously unstudied and often endangered languages—especially indigenous languages of North America and Australia. Languages investigated by Hale include Navajo,O'odham,Warlpiri,and Ulwa.
Lyle Richard Campbell is an American scholar and linguist known for his studies of indigenous American languages,especially those of Central America,and on historical linguistics in general. Campbell is professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.
Language documentation is a subfield of linguistics which aims to describe the grammar and use of human languages. It aims to provide a comprehensive record of the linguistic practices characteristic of a given speech community. Language documentation seeks to create as thorough a record as possible of the speech community for both posterity and language revitalization. This record can be public or private depending on the needs of the community and the purpose of the documentation. In practice,language documentation can range from solo linguistic anthropological fieldwork to the creation of vast online archives that contain dozens of different languages,such as FirstVoices or OLAC.
Ofelia Zepeda is a Tohono O'odham poet and intellectual. She is Regents' Professor of Tohono O'odham language and linguistics and Director of the American Indian Language Development Institute (AILDI) at The University of Arizona. Zepeda is the editor for Sun Tracks,a series of books that focuses on the work of Native American artists and writers,published by the University of Arizona Press.
Leanne Hinton is an American linguist and emerita professor of linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley.
Frances Jane Hassler Hill was an American anthropologist and linguist who worked extensively with Native American languages of the Uto-Aztecan language family and anthropological linguistics of North American communities.
Jerold Alan Edmondson is an American linguist. His work spans four subdisciplines:historical and comparative linguistics,East Asian linguistics,field linguistics,and phonetics. He is a leading specialist in Tai–Kadai languages of East Asia,especially the Kam–Sui and Kra branches.
Emiliana Cruz is a contemporary linguistic anthropologist. She received her doctorate in linguistic anthropology from University of Texas at Austin and currently teaches at CIESAS-CDMX. She is the co-founder of the Chatino Language Documentation Project.
Margaret Florey is an Australian linguist whose work focuses on the revitalization and maintenance of Indigenous Australian languages. She has documented changes in contemporary speech,such as the expression Yeah,no which is becoming more prevalent in Australia.
The Institute on Collaborative Language Research or CoLang is a biennial training institute in language documentation for any person interested in community-based,collaborative language work. CoLang has been described as part of a modern collaborative model in community-based methodologies of language revitalization and documentation.
Within the linguistic study of endangered languages,sociolinguists distinguish between different speaker types based on the type of competence they have acquired of the endangered language. Often when a community is gradually shifting away from an endangered language to a majority language,not all speakers acquire full linguistic competence;instead,speakers have varying degrees and types of competence depending on their exposure to the minority language in their upbringing. The relevance of speaker types in cases of language shift was first noted by Nancy Dorian,who coined the term semi-speaker to refer to those speakers of Sutherland Gaelic who were predominantly English-speaking and whose Gaelic competence was limited and showed considerable influence from English. Later studies added additional speaker types such as rememberers,and passive speakers. In the context of language revitalization,new speakers who have learned the endangered language as a second language are sometimes distinguished.
Madeleine Mathiot was a Professor emerita of Linguistics at the University at Buffalo in Buffalo,New York.
Megan Jane Crowhurst is an Australian- and Canadian-raised linguist and Professor of Linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin in the United States.
Siri Tuttle is the former director of the Alaska Native Language Center,the Alaska Native Language Archive,and a former Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Alaska,Fairbanks. She specializes in Dene (Athabascan) languages of interior Alaska and has contributed to the fields of acoustic phonetics,phonology,and morphology. She retired in 2021.
Sinasian Sign Language (SSSL) is a village sign language of the Sinasina valley in Chimbu Province,Papua New Guinea. This language is used by approximately 3 deaf and 50 hearing individuals,including members of the Kere community. SSSL was first encountered and reported by linguists in 2016. Documentation efforts are ongoing.
Juan Dolores,was a Tohono O'odham Native American of the Koló:di dialect,acting as one of the first linguists of the O'odham language. He is the first person to document traditional Tohono O'odham fables and myths,and worked with Alfred L. Kroeber to document the first studies into the O'odham language's grammar,which would eventually be compiled and published alongside other documents in The Language of the Papago of Arizona by John Alden Mason.