Notes on Contributors
Dindo Agan is a field researcher and member of the Buhid community from Oriental Mindoro in the Philippines.
Rob Amery is associate professor of Linguistics in the School of Humanities at the University of Adelaide in South Australia, where he has taught linguistics and Australian Indigenous languages for many years. He has worked with the local Kaurna community and with schools teaching Kaurna for over 30 years, completing a PhD on Kaurna language reclamation in 1998. He has published widely on the Kaurna language and language revival, and works to build capacity within the community and to re-introduce the language. He manages a small team at the University of Adelaide that produces a wide range of Kaurna language resources.
Timothy Currie Armstrong is a senior lecturer in Gaelic and Communication at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, the Gaelic college on the Isle of Skye in Scotland, where he directs an intensive, immersion Gaelic course in the first year of the College’s Gaelic-medium degree programs. His most recent book, Às na Freumhan: Eachdraidh air Iomairt na Sgoileadh Gàidhlig ann an Dùn Èideann, 1998–2011, is an activist history of the long and contentious campaign to establish a Gaelic-medium primary school in Scotland’s capital city.
Christopher Baylan is a field researcher and member of the Hanunuo community from Occidental Mindoro in the Philippines.
Catherine Bow † was a linguist with a wide range of research specialisms including the phonology of the Moloko language of Cameroon, language development in children with impaired hearing, endangered languages, and the communication needs of international medical graduates. Until her untimely passing she worked as project manager for the Living Archive of Aboriginal Languages, and as co-ordinator of the Digital Language Shell and the online Bininj Kunwok language and culture course.
Satwiko Budiono is a researcher at the National Research and Innovation Agency of Indonesia. Before taking up his current position he conducted linguistic and cultural research at the Indonesian National Agency for Language Development and Cultivation within the Ministry of Education, Culture, Research, and Technology. He holds a BA in Indonesian Literature and a MA in Linguistics with a specialisation in language and cultural studies from the University of Indonesia. Has a particular interest in local language research in Indonesia, especially language mapping, sociolinguistics, lexicography, language revitalisation, and endangered languages.
Emerenciana Catapang is the Executive Director of the Mangyan Heritage Center in Mindoro, Philippines. She is an Ibanag, one of the Indigenous groups in the Northern Philippines. She has been working with the Mangyans for the past 30 years. She has given lectures at several organisations and universities in the United States and has researched Mangyan documents and artifacts in libraries and museums there.
Uyan Daay is a member of the Hanunuo community from Oriental Mindoro in the Philippines. She is a member of staff and assistant researcher at the Mangyan Heritage Center.
Tjeerd de Graaf was Associate Professor of Phonetics at Groningen University until 2003 and since then has been a research fellow at the Mercator Centre of the Frisian Academy, which co-ordinates research on European minorities. He has conducted research on endangered languages in Siberia and Japan, has had a collaboration with the Foundation for Siberian Cultures (Germany), and has been a guest researcher at the University of St. Petersburg (Russian Federation) and at the Slavic Research Center of Hokkaido University (Japan). Some of his projects have been financially supported by the Endangered Archives Programme at the British Library.
Javier Domingo studied Comparative Languages and Literatures as well as Italian Didactics at the University of Bologna, Italy. He later obtained an MA in Cultural and Linguistic Anthropology from the University of Venice, and is currently finishing his PhD in Linguistic Anthropology at the University of Montreal. His research project is a comparative study of ‘last speakers’ of endangered Indigenous languages in South and Central America. Since 2016 he has been doing ethnography with a group of Tehuelche from Patagonia who are interested in their heritage language, including work with Dora Manchado, who was considered the last Tehuelche and passed away in 2019.
Valts Ernštreits is director and senior researcher at the University of Latvia Livonian Institute and a researcher at the University of Tartu. He has extensive experience in the study, standardisation, and development of digital resources for Livonian. As a Livonian and one of the language’s few remaining speakers, he has been involved with many activities focused on safeguarding and empowering Livonian language and heritage for over 30 years. He serves as an advisor to the Minister of Culture of the Republic of Latvia and as Latvia’s representative to and co-chair of the Global Task Force for Making a Decade of Action for Indigenous Languages (2022–2032).
Meili Fang completed her PhD in Linguistics at Ochanomizu University in Japan. She held a postdoctoral position at the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, and was then Assistant Professor of Japanese at Fu-Jen University in Taiwan, and Foreign Professor in Mandarin Chinese at Tsukuba University and Ochanomizu University. She has taught Hokkien at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies and at SOAS, University of London, and has taught Mandarin at Imperial College. She has done fieldwork and published on the endangered language Siraya in Taiwan, has published on language pedagogy and on Japanese and Chinese linguistics, and has produced several language learning texts.
Mary-Anne Gale has been working in the fields of Aboriginal education and languages for over four decades as a teacher, teacher linguist, and support linguist in both the Northern Territory and South Australia. Since 2003, she has been working specifically in language revival with Aboriginal languages in southern South Australia. Her specialty is training and empowering Aboriginal people to learn and teach their own endangered Aboriginal languages. She has also worked intensely and collaboratively in producing language resources for the revival process, such as dictionaries, learners’ guides, alphabet books, and phrase books for the Ngarrindjeri and Kaurna languages.
Susie Greenwood is a postgraduate student, tutor, and research assistant in the School of Humanities at the University of Adelaide. She is currently involved with several research projects relating to Kaurna language revival with a focus on primary source documents, whilst completing her PhD on the Celtic languages of Cornwall and Brittany. Greenwood is co-author of Kaurna Warrapiipa: Kaurna to English Dictionary (Wakefield Press, 2021) and has recently worked on developing a Kaurna language website
Ganjar Harimansyah is a researcher and a chairman of the South Sulawesi Provincial Language Center in Indonesia. Since 2001 he has published widely on a variety of topics relating to Indonesian languages and linguistics in numerous venues including the Indonesian Open University Press and the Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies.
Erich Kasten studied social and cultural anthropology and taught at the Free University of Berlin. He has conducted field research in the Canadian Pacific Northwest and in Kamchatka and has curated international museum exhibitions. As the first coordinator of the Siberian research group at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, he studied transformations in post-Soviet Siberia. In ensuing projects, he documented and analysed Indigenous knowledge. Since 2010 he has been the director of the Foundation for Siberian Cultures in Fürstenberg/Havel (Germany), where he has also applied himself to developing websites for enhancing access and sustaining endangered cultural heritage.
Natalia Kudriavtseva is Professor of Translation and Slavic Studies at Kryvyi Rih State Pedagogical University, Ukraine. Her research focuses on language policies, identities, and Ukrainian language education. Her recent work explores the shift to Ukrainian among Ukraine’s speakers of Russian, particularly the influence of language ideologies on Russian speakers’ willingness to learn and use Ukrainian in Ukraine. Natalia has published internationally and written for the US Kennan Institute’s Focus Ukraine blog. She has held fellowships at Kennan, the University of Cambridge, the Alfried Krupp Institute for Advanced Study, Greifswald, and Hanse Institute for Advanced Study, Delmenhorst.
Gunta Kļava is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Livonian Institute and lecturer in sociolinguistics in the Faculty of Education, Psychology and Art at the University of Latvia. She obtained her PhD in General Linguistics from the University of Latvia in 2019. Her research interests include language policy, endangered languages, language situation, language and identity, and language acquisition. For more than 10 years, she has been involved in and leading research on the language situation in Latvia that serves as the scientific foundation for a language policy in the country.
Gilson Wajuru Massaká is a teacher in Brazil’s Rio Guaporé Indigenous Land.
David Nathan trained in linguistics, computing, and management. As a researcher at AIATSIS in Canberra he co-authored the world’s first web dictionary for the Indigenous Australian language Gamilaraay. He has taught computing, linguistics, cognitive science, and multimedia, with publications including the textbook Australia’s Indigenous Languages and papers on archiving, language documentation, audio, internet, and lexicography. As Director of the Endangered Languages Archive at SOAS, University of London, his team developed new approaches to archiving digital language documentation and trained a generation of linguists in technologies and methods for documentary linguistics. He recently retired from his position as linguist for the Groote Eylandt Language Centre.
Antônia Fernanda de Souza Nogueira is assistant professor at the Federal University of Pará, Brazil. Her main area of research is language description. Since 2008, she has been working on the documentation, description, and analysis of the Wayoro language (ISO 639–3: wyr).
Colleen Alena O’Brien is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Saarland, Germany. She received her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Her dissertation was a comprehensive grammatical description of Kamsá, a language isolate spoken in southern Colombia. She has worked on other languages including Gorontalo, Fataluku, and Subanon. Her research interests also include the intersection of peacebuilding and ethnographic filmmaking, and she is the producer of Strangers to Peace, a documentary film that follows the lives of three ex-guerrilla fighters of the FARC as they return to civilian life in Colombia.
Anya Postma is a member of the Hanunuo community from Oriental Mindoro in the Philippines. She is a member of staff and assistant researcher at the Mangyan Heritage Center. She is also the daughter of linguist-anthropologist Antoon Postma, who worked and lived among the Mangyans for decades.
Jhonnatan Rangel holds a PhD in Linguistics from INALCO in Paris, France. He is a first-generation college graduate and a postdoctoral researcher at the Structures et Dynamiques des Langues (SeDyL) research centre in France. His research interests include language variation, documentation, revitalisation and reclamation of critically endangered languages, language ideologies, language policies, and language attitudes. He is a researcher and advisor for Indigenous community-driven projects in southern Mexico focusing on leveraging technology for capacity building, documentation, revitalisation, and reclamation for communities of critically endangered languages.
Wany Bernardete de Araujo Sampaio is a linguist with a BA in Portuguese Language and Literature, and an MA and PhD in Linguistics, as well as a PhD in School Education, and she has done postdoctoral work on cognitive linguistics. She is Associate Professor (Emerita) at the Federal University of Rondônia, Brazil. She works in undergraduate and postgraduate programmes, contributing to teaching provision in Linguistics and Literature. Her main research areas are the description of Indigenous languages; metaphor, space, and movement; teacher training; and Indigenous school education. She also reviews technical, academic, and scientific texts.
Ari Sherris is an associate professor of bilingual education at Texas A&M University-Kingsville. His research is situated at the intersection of Indigenous language revitalisation, documentation, and knowledges. His scholarship documents and archives the language activism of the Safaliba people living on their traditional lands in Ghana and their understudied language and culture. This scholarship includes the study of Safaliba conceptual metaphors and cultural practices that situate the Safaliba development of written materials in schools. He is co-editor of Making Signs, Translanguaging Ethnographies, a monograph where he co-develops a complex social semiotic approach to sign/meaning making.
Vera da Silva Sinha is an anthropologist, linguist, and social scientist with Master’s degrees in Anthropology and Criminology and a PhD in Linguistics from the University of East Anglia. She is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the Universities of Oxford and Bergen. She has worked with different Indigenous communities in Brazil. Her research topics innovatively combine theories and methods from anthropology, linguistics, and cognitive science. The major focus of her recent work has been on time and number. She is currently developing new research directions in environmental and ecological cognition, Indigenous teaching and learning, ethnomathematics, and autobiographical and collective narrative.
Johnny Solina is a field researcher and member of the Hanunuo community from Oriental Mindoro in the Philippines.
Mujahid Torwali is from the Swat District in northeastern Pakistan. Between 2011 and 2019 he worked as a language researcher with IBT, a civil society organisation in Bahrain, Swat. He has an interest in the Indigenous language and culture of the Torwali community of Swat. Mujahid writes about the Indigenous culture and languages of northern Pakistan and his main focus is the preservation and promotion of his mother tongue, Torwali. In 2018 Mujahid completed a teacher training course at the University of Massachusetts. He is currently working on a PhD in Linguistics at the University of Sydney, Australia.
Zubair Torwali is co-founder of IBT, an organisation focused on education, development, and languages of the Indigenous communities of northern Pakistan. He has authored and supervised several books in and about the Indigenous Torwali language. His book in English, Muffled Voices, provides insight into Pakistan’s social, cultural, and political issues. Zubair has more than two dozen research articles to his credit, along with hundreds of articles in the English dailies and weeklies of Pakistan. His area of research and work is the languages, cultures, history, anthropology and colonisation of the communities of North Pakistan.
Jakelin Troy is Ngarigu of the Snowy Mountains, southeastern Australia. She is Director, Indigenous Research, The University of Sydney. Her research is focused on supporting Indigenous communities, including her own Ngarigu people, to thrive in the use of their languages and cultural practices. She has been collaborating with Mujahid Torwali of the Torwali community in Swat, Pakistan, in research projects about his language, music traditions, and educational practices in Swat.
Pinoy Tugas is a field researcher and member of the Buhid community from Oriental Mindoro in the Philippines.
Radu Voica was until recently a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow hosted by SOAS, University of London, where he had also gained his MA and PhD. He remains affiliated with SOAS as a Research Associate and has a part-time afilliation with the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at UCL. His main research interest is endangered and minoritised languages, and his MA thesis reflected his early interest in Eastern Romance. Later, he switched to Austronesian (Oceanic), and documented the Blablanga language the Solomon Islands, the structure of which is analysed in his PhD thesis.
Adão Wajuru is the Wajuru leader in Brazil’s Rio Guaporé Indigenous Land.
Tobias Weber is a doctoral research assistant at the Graduate School Language and Literature at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. He studied Uralic linguistics and Language Documentation and Description at the Ludwig Maximilian University and SOAS, University of London. His PhD thesis discusses linguistic legacy materials of the South Estonian Kraasna variety, for which he discovered previously unknown phonograph recordings. Apart from South Estonian, his research focuses on language pedagogy for minority languages, language policy and planning, and interdisciplinary approaches combining sociolinguistics, sociology, and economics. The interdisciplinary nature of this research guides his teaching philosophy, with a strong emphasis on developing students’ literacies.
Louward Allen Zubiri is the Head Researcher at the Mangyan Heritage Center. He is currently a PhD student in Linguistics at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and a student affiliate of the East-West Center. His research interests are in the areas of description, documentation, and revitalisation of non-dominant and/or scarcely described Philippine languages and scripts. He is interested in how these areas are informed by and interdependent with policymaking, education, community development, and heritage awareness.