harjo@ou.edu
Copeland Hall Room 240
I am a linguist interested in documenting and describing endangered and under-resourced languages, and I work with language communities on projects related to language research and language revitalization. I also manage the Native American Languages collection, where we are currently working to make language materials available digitally. My linguistic work has focused on morphosyntactic typology and rarer syntactic phenomena, particularly the structure and function of antipassives and their relationship to ergativity. My fieldwork to date has centered on the Indigenous languages of the Americas, mainly Mayan languages and Enlhet-Enenlhet languages. I have also been a linguist for Kuhpani Yoyani Luhchi Yoroni (Tunica Language Project) to revitalize Tunica, an awakening language of the Tunica-Biloxi Tribe of Louisiana, since 2010. Additionally, I head a collaborative documentation project for Enenlhet, a language of the Central Chaco (Paraguay), and am working on a grammar and dictionary for this language. Since coming to Oklahoma, I have collaborated with language practitioners from tribes all over the state to make use of existing archival materials in their programs, and also to record new material which will benefit future generations of language learners. I am very proud of my students who have done novel work in Oklahoma relating to (among other things) language acquisition, linguistic repositories, lexicography, and fieldwork ethics.
