Linguistics Award Winners and Student Research Projects
Sarah Babinski '16 is participating in the CoLang Institute for Collaborative Language Research at the University of Texas at Arlington, where she will be doing field methods. She will spend two weeks taking workshops about grantwriting, lexicography, FLEx, pedagogical grammar, using technology in documentation/revitalization, etc. During the four weeks after that, she will be working with a group of fellow students on Innu (an Algonquin language) and will be able to practice what she learned in the workshops as well as the elicitation skills that she gained in Field Methods last fall.
May Plumb '16 Haverford College received a grant from the Center for Peace & Global Citizenship to work with Professor Brook Lillehaugen, analyzing 17th and 18th-century documents in Oaxaca, Mexico. Several state and local archives in Oaxaca hold documents from the Mexican colonial period written in indigenous languages. May will look at documents written in Colonial Valley Zapotec (CVZ); her goals are to identify documents written in CVZ, secure permission to post them online as part of the Ticha Project, and help the modern Zapotec people access the knowledge held in these ancestral documents.
Rachel Vogel ’16 will be at the Smithsonian, interning with the Recovering Voices initiative, which works to document and revitalize endangered languages. She will contribute to a new project that they are starting to investigate and assess language revitalization strategies around the world. Her work will mainly involve doing literature reviews and research on these strategies and programs. She will also spend part of the summer volunteering at the Smithsonian's Folklife Festival, which runs from June 25 through 29 and July 2 through 6.
