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Patrick Marlow serves as the program director for the Linguistics program.  Patrick Marlow received his Ph.D. in Linguistics in 1997. His interests include Historical Linguistics, Language Policy and Planning, and Language Education. Since coming to Alaska he has been principal investigator or Co-PI on several U.S. Department of Education grants focusing on language education, teacher training and language revitalization, including: Denaqenage' Career Ladder Program (1998-2003; 2001-2006), Yupiit Nakmiin Qaneryaraat (w/Alexie2005-2008), Second Language Acquisition and Teacher Education (w/ Siekmann 2006-2009), and Preparing Teachers of Yup'ik Language and Culture (w/ Siekmann 2008-2011), Computer Assisted Language Learning for Alaska Native Languages (w/ Siekmann & Martelle) 2012-2016.

Selected Publications

Marlow, P. & Siekmann, S. (Eds.) (2013). Communities of Practice: An Alaskan Native Model for Language Teaching and Learning. University of Arizona Press. 

Current Research Projects

Family Bilingualism

Ryan, Siekmann, Marlow

A qualitative multiple case study investigation into the motivations, attitudes and practices of two families successfully raising bilingual children. Activity Systems Analysis is used to investigate the importance of present action as it relates to the past (e.g., ties to family, place) and the future (e.g., children’s choice and agency).

This changes everything! It isn’t sloppy language.
Discourses of English Learner and Dialect in Alaskan K-12 settings

Marlow, Whitehead Martelle, Webster

A qualitative investigation into the efficacy of graduate course work in addressing a deficit orientation to the identification of speakers of Alaskan Regional Englishes. Throughout the course, teachers engaged in linguistic analysis through collaborative discovery learning projects on Alaska Regional Englishes (ARE) with the explicit goals of discovering (a) the linguistic principle that all dialects (including ARE) are equally valid, rule governed and expressive, (b) the harmful effects of the commonly expressed belief that students “don’t have either language”, and (c) the privileged nature of Standardized American English (SAE) in school-based curricula.

As a linguistic anthropologist I am animated by thinking about language as a cultural resource. I liken my training and outlook to a “toolbox” that allows me to investigate cultural formations in a way that gets beyond what can be unearthed by interviews and participant observation. Using language as a lens—and discourse analysis as a tool—illuminates how the form of an utterance or speech event can “say” and “do” in ways that are meaningful beyond its content. I also believe that semiotics, one of the frameworks in my arsenal, has much to offer cultural anthropologists and archeologists. I am enthusiastic about working with students whose interests are not only firmly centered in linguistic anthropology, but also those who seek advising on research design, field methods and interpretation of things ranging from grammatical structures, narratives and interviews to the semiotic use of space and material culture.

In my own research I use my methodological and conceptual toolkit to investigate core issues of anthropological and ethnographic interest: personhood, subjectivity, kinship, ritual, religion and morality. I explore these things in my primary fieldsite in highland Guatemala, where I have done extensive research with two ethnolinguistic groups, the K'iche' and Sakapultek Maya. I have also pursued research with North American evangelicals and US conservative talk radio. I draw from my research in my teaching and have offered courses on linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, the language of religion and ritual, discourse analysis, the cultural construction of the self, and political media. 

Specializations

• Linguistic Anthropology
• Anthropology of Christianity
• Discourse Analysis
• Self and Subjectivity
• Ethnography of Moralities
• Indigenous Languages and Cultures
• Mesoamerica and the United States

Selected Publications

Articles

Publications

Curriculum Vitae

Research Interests

Selected Publications

Selected Publications

Articles

• Ryan, È. (2021) 
  International Journal of Bilingualism.
• Ryan, È. (2021) 
  Bilingual Research Journal, 44(1), 108-123.
• Ryan, È. (2020)
  Journal of Language, Identity & Education.

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

Siri Tuttle served as director of the Alaska Native Language Center and has worked with the Alaska Native Language Archive to preserve and provide access to a vast collection of manuscripts and recordings documenting Alaska's rich linguistic history. She is an Athabascan languages specialist with special interests in prosody -- tone, stress, and intonation. Her dissertation research on the Tanana language was done here in Fairbanks. Since receiving her Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 1998, Siri has studied San Carlos and Jicarilla Apache data at the Phonetics Laboratory at UCLA and pursued questions in Navajo, Kaska, Ahtna, and Galice Athabascan at the Technische Universität Berlin. Her present projects involve description and language revitalization in Ahtna and Lower Tanana.

Selected Publications

Articles

• Vowels and Vocables in Lower Tanana Athabascan (TAA) - Journal of Phonetic Society of Japan
•  - Linguistic Discovery

Publications

Curriculum Vitae

Anna Berge received her PhD in Linguistics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1997. She has specialized in West Greenlandic and Unangam Tunuu (Aleut) and does theoretical and descriptive work in syntax and discourse. She is currently working on comparative Eskimo-Aleut linguistics, Aleut language documentation, and Aleut language learning materials.

Specializations

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. 

Selected Publications

Articles

• , Language Dispersal Beyond Farming
• , 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
• . Linguistic Discovery.
• 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

Publications