Together with my colleague Lane Schwartz (UIUC), our students, and members of the Yupik community, I am working on Akuzipik/St. Lawrence Island Yupik/Central Siberian Yupik. The language is endangered and under-documented. We are working to better document the morphosyntax, semantics, phonology, and phonetics of the language; to digitize existing materials in and on the language; and to create computer tools for language users.
I am currently funded (2022-2027) by an NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award (#2142340): “CAREER: Documenting temporal contrasts in an endangered language via community linguistics”.
We are also currently (2018-2023) funded by a pair of collaborative 54-month NSF Documenting Endangered Languages grants (#1760977, #1761680): “NNA: Collaborative Research: Integrating Language Documentation and Computational Tools for Yupik, an Alaska Native Language”.
On the GMU Language Documentation Lab page you can find our publications, tools, and code, links to Web and print resources about Yupik, and other useful information.
Our project got a little bit of publicity here (and here and here) on the Mason site and the project is featured in the spring 2019 issue of Mason’s English Department alumni magazine English Matters as well as the summer 2019 issue of Mason’s magazine Spirit (read the article here). It was also featured in the August 2021 newsletter of the NSF Navigating the New Arctic Community Office (NNA-CO).