Happy International Mother Language Day! After 5 seasons, this is the final episode of Field Notes! Today's interview is between Laura Tsutsui (Field Notes producer) and Martha Tsutsui Billins (Field Notes host) on Amami sociolinguistic research, plus a look back at the last five years of podcasting. Thanks so much for listening!  Things mentioned in this episode:  Uchinaa Yamatu-guchi Yaeyama language Amami languages Ryukyuan language family Uchinaaguchi (Okinawan) language Miyako language Dunan (Yonaguni) language Pragmatic Consequences of Language Shift: A Contrastive Study of Po ..read more

This episode is with  Alexandra Philbin. Alexandra is originally from Dublin, Ireland, and now lives in València, Spain. She is carrying out doctoral research in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at the University of València. Her research focuses on the experiences of urban speakers of minoritized languages, particularly Irish speakers in Dublin and Valencian (Catalan) speakers in València. Before moving to València, she completed an undergraduate degree in World Languages at University College Cork, and a master’s degree in Linguistic Anthropology at Maynooth Universit ..read more

This month's episode is with Yulha Lhawa from the University of Washington and the Endangered Languages Project. Yulha Lhawa, originally from Siyuewu Village in Sichuan, China, is a passionate advocate for her community's traditions and language. Growing up as a yak herder, Yulha developed an interest in linguistics during high school. This interest fueled her to create the trilingual book "Warming Your Hands by Moonlight," aimed at preserving local history and folklore. Taking her dedication a step further, Yulha journeyed to the United States from the Himalayas to study linguistics at the Un ..read more

This month's episode is with Dr. Karolina Grzech at the University of Valencia. Karolina is a documentary and descriptive linguist, working mostly on Quechuan languages and natural language use. Her main topics of research are evidentiality (encoding how we know things) and epistemicity (encoding different aspects of knowledge). She is particularly interested in how these categories play out in natural discourse. She also researches pragmatics in general, and, language endangerment and methodology of linguistic fieldwork, with special reference to the indigenous language of South America ..read more

Field Notes is back for its fifth and final season! Season five's inagural episode is with Patrick Heinrich from the Ca' Foscari University of Venice. Patrick received his Masters degree in Linguistics and Japanese Studies in 1998 from Heinrich-Heine University Düsseldorf. He completed his PhD in Japanese Studies in 2002 at Duisburg University. He is a sociolinguist who has worked extensively in the Ryukyuan archipelago, and has written many publications on language ideology, language shift, language reclamation, language planning and policy, and language and well-being. Along with Shinsho Miy ..read more

This month's very special episode is with Myfany Turpin, an Associate Professor at the University of Sydney. Myfany has been working on Australian Aboriginal songs and languages since 1996. Her research interests include the relationship between language and music, especially of lesser-known cultures; and identifying ways to support the continuation of endangered languages and performance arts. Her work examines Aboriginal song-poetry and its relationship to spoken languages and the documentation of the Kaytetye language and encyclopaedic knowledge, an Arandic language of Central Australia. Th ..read more

This month's episode is with Nicholas Welch from Memorial University of Newfoundland. Nicholas is the Canada Research Chair in Change, Adaptation and Revitalization of Aboriginal Languages and Assistant Professor at Memorial University of Newfoundland. He received his B.A. and M.A. in Linguistics from the University of Victoria. His Ph.D. is from the University of Calgary and his dissertation was entitled: "The bearable lightness of being: The encoding of coincidence in two- copula languages". He has done extensive research on Dene and Algonquian morphosyntax, and has also done language r ..read more

This month's very special episode is with Michelle Kamigaki-Baron. Michelle is a PhD student in the department of Linguistics at the University of British Columbia. She was born and raised in Hawai’i into a family of coffee plantation laborers from Honaunau, Hawai’i. Her research primarily involves speech production and perception, how these processes are changed in the context of bilingualism or bidialectalism of languages that exist in diglossia, and the continuous nature of language. She works primarily with the Secwepemc community in BC with speakers of the Secwepemctsín language and also ..read more

This month’s episode is with Ambrocio Gutiérrez Lorenzo from the University of Colorado Boulder. Ambrocio earned his PhD at the University of Texas at Austin in 2021. He earned his MA in 2014 at the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (CIESAS), Mexico. He is a documentary and descriptive linguist whose research focuses on the syntax and semantics of the Zapotec (Otomanguean) languages of southern Mexico. He has also worked on adjacent areas of phonology and morphology and has broad interests across all the linguistic subfields, including especially discourse ..read more

Today's episode is with Jessica Coon, an Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics at McGill University and Canada Research Chair in Syntax and Indigenous Languages.  Much of Jessica’s work has focused on Mayan languages, in particular Ch’ol (a language of southern Mexico) and Chuj (a language of Guatemala). She has also researched Mi’gmaq, an Algonquian language of eastern Canada. In addition to theoretical work on these languages, She has worked to build collaborations with the communities of speakers who are working to document, promote, and revitalize these languages. At Mc ..read more