Andrew Garrett (Director) is Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. As a Californianist he has done linguistic fieldwork, archival work, and consulting work with the Hupa, Karuk, Northern Paiute, Rumsen Ohlone, and Sierra Miwok languages, but his main focus is Yurok (in northwest California). His Yurok projects include articles on descriptive and historical linguistics, contributions to the tribal language program (including a practical dictionary compiled with Juliette Blevins and Lisa Conathan), ongoing work on Yurok texts, and a digital text and lexical archive. In Yurok grammar, Garrett is especially interested in relations between lexical and morphological structures on the one hand, and between lexical and syntactic patterns on the other. This year (2010), in collaboration with several colleagues, he has begun a new project to analyze language contact dynamics along the Klamath River. More generally, he studies the dialectology of languages of the west coast and the emergence of the distinctive California linguistic profile. Outside California, Garrett also works on Indo-European historical linguistics, especially Anatolian, Greek, and Latin, and general problems of language change and linguistic reconstruction.

Leanne Hinton (Director Emerita) teaches courses on American Indian languages as well as sociolinguistics and general linguistics. She has done research on various languages of the Southwest, Mexico, and California. Over the past decade, much of her research and consulting has been focused on endangered languages and language revitalization. Three recent books by her in this area include Flutes of fire: Essays on California Indian languages (Heyday Books, 1994), The green book of language revitalization in practice (ed. with Ken Hale, Academic Press, 2001), and How to keep your language alive: A commonsense approach to one-on-one language learning (Heyday Books, 2002).

Lisa Conathan (Consulting Archivist) received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from Berkeley in 2004. Currently she is an archivist at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. As an archivist she works to improve preservation of and access to the documentation of endangered languages. She is also working to implement Berkeley's Breath of Life Workshop on a national scale in order to facilitate the use of primary sources to learn indigenous languages. At Yale, she catalogs the literary archives of Eastern European poets (including Joseph Brodsky and Czesław Miłosz) and is active in undergraduate research education. Prior to becoming an archivist, she carried out field work on Arapaho and Yurok and directed a three-year Arapaho documentation project supported by the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Programme.

Ronald Sprouse (Programmer) has worked as a linguist and programmer on a number of language documentation projects in addition to his work with the Survey. He served as Technical Director of the Ingush and Chechen projects that resulted in the publication of two dictionaries; in support of these projects he conducted fieldwork with Ingush and Chechen consultants, worked on lexical databases, and created a web-based system for collecting and annotating interlinear text. He was also a significant contributor to the Turkish Electronic Living Lexicon project, a lexical database of transcribed audio recordings for studying Turkish morphophonemics, for which he created a web-based search interface and tools for investigating the statistical properties of morphophonemic alternations in the data.

Justin Spence (Graduate Student Researcher) is a graduate student in linguistics at Berkeley. Together with other students in the department, he is currently working with a speaker of Hupa to document and describe her language. Since 2009 he has been collaborating with the Kawaiisu Language and Culture Center to develop a practical reference grammar for their language revitalization program. Spence is especially interested in issues surrounding access to archival language documentation for both academic and heritage audiences, and he relies heavily on archival materials in his own research on dialect contact phenomena in the Pacific Coast Athabaskan languages. Prior to joining the linguistics program at Berkeley in 2007, he worked on a variety of language documentation and revitalization projects in Aboriginal communities of Australia's Northern Territory.

John Sylak (Graduate Student Researcher) is a graduate student in linguistics at Berkeley. His experience with languages of the Americas began with studying Imbabura Quichua (spoken in Ecuador) in the 2009-2010 Field Methods course. In the summer of 2011, he participated in fieldwork on the Maijiki language (Orejón; Western Tukanoan) spoken in the northeastern Peruvian Amazon. Sylak developed an interest in California's native languages through participating in the 2010 Breath of Life workshop. His dissertation research centers around post-velar consonants and the phonetics-phonology interface. This topic grows out of his long-standing interest in languages with large consonant inventories. As part of that interest, John has done research on the phonology of Nuxalk (Bella Coola; Salish), and continues to work on languages of the Northeast Caucasus, especially Chechen and Lak.

Lev Michael (Assistant Professor of Linguistics) carries out ethnographically-informed linguistic research in several communities in Peruvian Amazonia, and has worked with speakers of Iquito (Zaparoan), Muniche (isolate), Nanti (Arawak), and Omagua (Tupí-Guaraní based contact language). As an anthropological linguist, his interests include the social instrumentality of deictic evidential categories (especially evidentiality), the formal structure and social function of verbal art, language contact and areality in Amazonia, language typology, language documentation and grammatical description, and the practice and politics of language revitalization. His blog on Amazonian languages and societies can be found here.

Line Mikkelsen (Assistant Professor of Linguistics) works with colleagues Alice Gaby and Andrew Garrett on the Karuk language of Northern California. Project goals include linguistic documentation and the creation of resources for community language programs. We are currently developing an online archive of Karuk texts and audio recordings and integrating these with the Karuk dictionary created by William Bright and Susan Gehr. As a syntactician, Mikkelsen is particularly interested in Karuk word order, about which very little is known, and in the internal organization of noun phrases, including the expression of possession and definiteness and the use of appositive pronouns.

Richard Rhodes (Associate Professor of Linguistics) conducts research on topics relating to American Indian languages, particularly those of the Algonquian family, including bringing insights gained in fieldwork to bear on typology and on analytic issues in better studied languages. He has done extensive fieldwork on the Ottawa dialect of Ojibwe which is spoken in Michigan and southern Ontario, and on Métchif, a language of the northern plains consisting of French and Cree elements. More recently he has done fieldwork on Sayula Popoluca, a Mixe-Zoquean language of southern Mexico. His most important work is the Eastern Ojibwe-Chippewa-Ottawa Dictionary which incorporates two dialects of Ojibwe. He has written extensively on the syntax of Ojibwe, on topics of Ojibwe ethnohistory, and on the lexicography of American Indian languages.

Michael Houser is a lecturer in the linguistics department at Berkeley. He works on Mono Lake Paiute, a variety of Northern Paiute spoken in eastern California. In collaboration with Molly Babel, Maziar Toosarvandani, and speakers in the community, he is creating an online dictionary and text database for the language. His other research interests lie in syntax and semantics.

Amy Campbell is a Ph.D. candidate in the linguistics department at Berkeley. Her research interests are focused on morphology, syntax, and Athabaskan languages. Along with several other Berkeley graduate students, she is currently working on expanding the documentation and description of Hupa (Pacific Coast Athabaskan) in a project funded by the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project. Presentations and publications include: "Meaning targets in syntax and morphology: A study of Hupa agreement" (NELS 40), "Rethinking perfectivity in Hupa" (2009 Athabaskan Languages Conference), and "Ditransitivity in Hupa" (in Andrej Malchukov, Martin Haspelmath, and Bernard Comrie, eds. Studies in Ditransitive Constructions, Mouton de Gruyter, 2010).

Erin Donnelly Kuhns is a graduate student in linguistics. With the Project for the Documentation of the Languages of Mesoamerica, she has conducted fieldwork on Choapan Zapotec, an indigenous language of Oaxaca, Mexico. Very little has been written about Choapan, and Erin's immediate goal is to produce a dictionary of it. Her description and documentation work will certainly continue post-dictionary. Erin is interested in phonology and historical linguistics, particularly with regard to Oto-Manguean languages. She also has a general curiosity in North American and Mesoamerican languages. She has recently begun working on Coatlán Zapotec and Karuk, and is excited to expand her linguistic horizons.

Ramon Escamilla is a fifth-year graduate student in linguistics. He has been involved in fieldwork on Hupa since September 2007. In June 2009, he participated in a field trip to the Peruvian Amazon to work with speakers of Katsakati (also 'Andoa,' Zaparoan), and is currently reconstructing Proto-Zaparoan from field data and other sources. He also works on Chungli Ao (Tibeto-Burman) with colleagues. Other interests within linguistics include Japanese, discourse analysis and issues of language and power.

Stephanie Farmer is a graduate student in the linguistics department at Berkeley. Her experience with languages of the Americas includes summer fieldwork on Muniche, a recently extinct isolate formerly spoken in the Loreto province of Peru. With data from three elderly semispeakers, she helped to produce a thematic dictionary and a pedagogical grammar for the community of Munichis.

Hannah Haynie is a graduate student interested in language ecology and linguistic geography. She has worked on Southeastern Pomo and is currently engaged in research on the Eastern Miwok languages. Her general interests include historical linguistics and syntactic theory, and she takes a special interest in the application of quantitative and technological tools to linguistic questions. Recent projects include a computational assessment of California language phylogenetics, a GIS study of spatial patterns in languages of the Amazon and the Caucasus, and ongoing dissertation work on the linguistic geography of California's Sierra Nevada.

Lindsey Newbold is a graduate student in the linguistics department at Berkeley. She is part of a group of Berkeley students working with one of the last fluent speakers of the Hupa language, and contributes to the online Hupa dictionary and text collection. She is currently working on word order and information structure in Hupa. She also does fieldwork on Kuna, a Chibchan language of Panama, focusing on text collection and affix order.

Clare Sandy is a graduate student in the linguistics department at Berkeley. She is part of a team that carries out fieldwork on Omagua, a highly endangered language of the Peruvian Amazon, and is currently working on grammatical description and analysis of that language. She also works on Karuk, and has worked with Mono speakers and language learners during the 2010 Breath of Life workshop. In addition to language documentation and revitalization, her interests include phonology, morphology, and language change.

Tammy Stark is a graduate student in the linguistics department at Berkeley. She has carried out field work on Omagua and Yanesha, indigenous languages of the Peruvian Amazon. She also forms part of a team of students and faculty members working to produce grammatical and pedagogical materials for the Karuk language of Northern California.

Vivian Wauters is a second-year graduate student in the linguistics program at Berkeley. She is currently working on Omagua, an endangered language of the Peruvian Amazon. Her personal project, which she completed for her undergraduate honors thesis, described the clause-linking constructions of the language. Her interests also include language typology and language contact, which she hopes to study further through graduate work on language documentation and description.

Rosemary Beam de Azcona received her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 2004 before embarking on postdoctoral fellowships at La Trobe University (Australia) and UC Davis. She is currently an NEH-funded Documenting Endangered Languages Fellow, affiliated with both UC Berkeley and UC Davis's Native American Language Center. Her interests include language documentation, grammatical description, tone, language contact and prehistory, areal linguistics, video documentation, and anything Zapotec-related. Her dissertation, currently being revised for publication with Mouton, was a grammar of Coatec Zapotec. She has worked on several varieties of Miahuatec Zapotec and since 2005 has been collaborating with Emiliano Cruz Santiago, a Miahuatec speaker and University of Sonora-based linguist. Some of their joint projects include a grammar and dictionary of Miahuatec, and a video documentary focused on the traditional Zapotec cornfield blessing ritual. She wrote the preface to Cruz Santiago's Jwá'n Ngwan-keéh Reéh Xa'gox (Beliefs of Our Ancestors), the first book to be published in Miahuatec. She has also worked briefly with other Otomanguean languages and is the founder of the only regularly-held conference devoted to Otomanguean and Oaxacan languages.

William F. Weigel received his Ph.D. in linguistics at Berkeley in 2005. He currently works as a consulting linguist for the Wiyot Tribe in Humboldt County, California and for several Yokuts language programs in central California. His main interests are language revitalization, language contact, and grammatical relations. He also works on the historical phonology of Yiddish. In previous incarnations, Bill has been a lawyer, a short-order cook, a bicycle messenger, and a wood-mold specialist.

Erin Haynes (Ph.D. 2010) is a Test Development Specialist at Indigenous Languages for Second Language Testing, Inc. While a graduate student at Berkeley, she worked primarily with the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs Reservation in central Oregon, where three indigenous languages are spoken: Wasco (Kiksht), Northern Paiute (Numu), and Sahaptin (Ichishkin). She has done various projects there, mostly involving language material archiving and sociolinguistic research. Her dissertation research focused on the phonetic/phonological acquisition of Northern Paiute by adult learners in Warm Springs, and she concurrently worked on an online audio dictionary for the tribes. She has also done field work on Mono Lake Paiute, a language spoken at the Bridgeport Indian Colony in eastern California.

Reiko Kataoka (Ph.D. 2011) is interested in phonetics, speech perception, and synchronic and diachronic phonology — in particular the role of phonetic constraints and speech perception in shaping synchronic sound patterns and diachronic change. Her dissertation investigated the physical, physiological, and cognitive mechanisms of sound change. She is also interested in descriptive phonetics. She has done field work in Mono Lake Northern Paiute, and subsequently engaged in analyzing phonetic correlates of the three-way stop contrast in another dialect of Northern Paiute. She also has strong interest in language revitalization projects. She has participated in previous Breath of Life California Indian Language Restoration Workshops (2004, 2006, 2008), working with members of Chumashan, Ohlone, Maidu, Nisenan, and Konkow languages.

Maziar Toosarvandani (Ph.D. 2010) is a Postdoctoral Fellow in linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He works with speakers of Mono Lake Paiute, a variety of Northern Paiute spoken in eastern California. He is collaborating with Michael Houser and Molly Babel (University of British Columbia) to produce an online dictionary and text database for the language. His theoretical interests lie in the areas of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. In addition to his dissertation work on association with focus — the semantic interaction of certain lexical items with focus — he pursues questions in a number of empirical domains, including ellipsis, nominalization, and complex predicates. This theoretical work is informed by his fieldwork on Northern Paiute, as well as his study of the Iranian branch of Indo-European, in particular the Persian language and the Dari language (spoken by the Zoroastrians of Iran).