Associates

Dr. Mark Donohue
Senior Director, Asia-Pacific Region. 2017-present

Mark Donohue is a linguist who has worked on the languages of Indonesia and Papua New Guinea (both Austronesian and Papuan) for the last 25 years. More recently, he has documented languages of the Himalayas in Nepal and Bhutan. His work employs the gamut of investigative techniques, from primary work with informants to naturalistic corpora, through to computational analyses of secondary datasets. He has written about questions in the phonetics, phonology, morphology and syntax of the languages.

The unifying thread that runs through his different projects is the non-static and non-independent nature of language and language use: rather than describing static systems, his research investigates the way languages interact with each other (contact), change over time (history), and show variation both in terms of geography (dialects and internal variation) and culture (gender, religion, trade), and within the same speaker’s speech, depending on social and linguistic contexts (multilingualism and polyglossia).

Some of his ongoing linguistics projects include:
Phonotactics, the study of patterns in syllable structure;
Phonology, particularly non-segmental patterns;
Morphosyntax, in particular case marking, agreement, and quantification;
Language description;
Language histories;
Language assistance to local communities;
Austronesian culture history, and the deconstruction of the myth of an ‘Austronesian steamroller’ neolithic event that reshaped Island Southeast Asia.

View Mark Donohue’s bibliography

 

Anna Luisa Daigneault, M.Sc.
Program Director, 2018-present
Regional Director, Americas Region, 2022-present
Latin America Projects Coordinator, 2009-2017
Development Officer, 2011-2017

Andres Ozuna Ortiz (left) and Anna Luisa Daigneault (right) at the Language and Nature Conference (Pittsburgh, USA, 2019)

Anna Luisa Daigneault is a linguistic anthropologist of Peruvian and French Canadian heritage, currently based in North Carolina, USA. She holds a Masters of Science in Linguistic Anthropology from Université de Montréal in Canada, and has extensive experience working with Indigenous communities in the Peruvian Amazon region, in particular with the Yanesha’ people. She has also conducted ethnolinguistic fieldwork throughout the Americas and in the Pacific Islands, and has contributed to the publication of print dictionaries (such as the Ɨshɨr Ebytoso – Spanish Dictionary, available in Paraguay) as well as over forty online Living Dictionaries for endangered and minority languages around the world.

Daigneault is the lead coordinator for the development of the Living Dictionaries platform, an online dictionary builder maintained by Living Tongues Institute, with the goal of providing free digital resources for threatened languages. She communicates with language communities worldwide, leads online training workshops and helps curate large sets of lexical data. Her duties at Living Tongues also include grant-writing, archiving collections, running the social media platforms, overseeing grant timelines as well as training interns and other personnel. Her articles has been published by The Dominion, Global Voices, SAPIENS and she has presented at TEDxGreensboro. Daigneault is also an accomplished vocalist and electronic music producer.

 

Dr. Luke Horo
Senior Researcher in Phonetics, 2022-present.
Institute Fellow & Post-doctoral Researcher for the South Asia Region, 2018-present

Dr. Luke Horo at the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2019) in Melbourne
Dr. Luke Horo at the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2019) in Melbourne.

Dr. Luke Horo is an experienced field-based researcher and a specialist in conducting instrumental studies in phonetic science. His research mainly focuses on the description and documentation of Munda languages in India, and his publications include a detailed phonetic description of vowels and syllable prominence in the Sora varieties of Assam and Odisha. Dr. Horo is also an alumnus of the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati where he completed his PhD dissertation “A Phonetic Description of Assam Sora” in 2018. He is currently one of the lead researchers on the Sora language documentation project.

Publications: ‪Luke Horo – ‪Google Scholar

Research Activities:
Luke Horo | Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages – Academia.edu
Luke Horo | ResearchGate

 

Opino Gomango
Sora Language Project, 2007-present
Local Project Coordinator/Field Researcher:
Remo & Gta’ projects (India), 2010-present

Opino Gomango

Opino Gomango is a Sora language activist who began working with Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages in 2007 to help document his native Sora language. In 2008, he initiated the “Sora Talking Dictionary and Online Grammar Project” that continues through the present day, and will be published as the Sora Living Dictionary in 2023. In 2010, Opino took on the role of Local Project Coordinator and Field Researcher for the State of Odisha for the Documentation of Remo Project, and for the Gta’ Living Dictionary and Online Grammar Project that are components of Living Tongues Institute’s Munda Languages Initiative.

In 2017, Opino Gomango gave a presentation at the National Language Conference, which took place at the National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST) in Berhampur, India. His presentation was about the current status of the Sora-Juray dialect continuum. Mr. Gomango presented his Sora sociolinguistic research at the 3rd International Linguistics Conference in Sri Lanka, and also travelled to the 38th Annual Conference of the Linguistic Society of Nepal, where he presented a paper on Sora noun incorporation.

 

Dr. Bikram Jora
Regional Coordinator, South Asia, 2015-present
Local Project Manager (India), 2010-2014

Screen Shot 2015-04-01 at 5.38.12 PMDr. Bikram Jora has extensive field experience with India tribal languages in Jharkhand, Odisha, Himachal Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh and Karnataka. His research is on morphology, phonology, syntax and child language acquisition. He received his PhD in Linguistics from Delhi University in 2014.

Dr. Jora has taken part and helped lead a number of Living Tongues field trips (2011 – 2022) to Munda-speaking communities throughout his home state of Jharkhand, and in Odisha, where the majority of Munda speakers are found. This includes surveys of Birhor, Bhumij, Ho, Santali, Kharia, Kera’ Mundari and Tamaria Mundari communities. He has also taken part in field expeditions with Dr. Greg Anderson to Arunachal Pradesh to document the Koro Aka, Hruso Aka, Bangru, Puroik and Sartang languages. His currently one of the lead researchers on Living Tongues’ Birhor Documentation Project, which has published the first-ever children’s book in the Birhor language, an ethnobotanical study of Birhor plants as well as a trilingual Birhor-Hindi-English dictionary. 

Dr. Jora gave two joint presentations at the Twenty Seventh Meeting of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society (SEALS 27) in Padang, West Sumatra, Indonesia. The first paper, in collaboration with linguist Luke Horo, was entitled Phonetic realisation of a Schwa like vowel “x” in Santali and the next, in collaboration with Living Tongues Director Dr. Gregory D. S. Anderson, was entitled Introduction to Birhor verb morphology. Dr. Bikram Jora also attended an international linguistics seminar on expressives in Tokyo, Japan. Along with other scholars of Munda languages, he proposed a joint Indo-Japanese research group called the International Munda Studies Network.

 

Dr. Nathan Badenoch
Regional Coordinator, Southeast Asia. 2021-present

Dr. Nathan Badenoch has been working in the field in mainland Southeast since 1999, researching languages, cultures and ecosystems of upland people. He is interested in the diversity of languages spoken in the region and the networks of language use that connect people. His previous work in local environmental governance facilitated his exposure to how language is used and changes within specific socio-ecological settings. His recent geographic focus has been northern Laos, where he is currently engaged in ethnolinguistic research on Austroasiatic (Bit, Ksingmul, Phong) and Tibeto-Burman languages (Pana, Paza, Sida). He also works on Mundari, spoken in eastern India, particularly with regards to expressives in oral performance. In terms of cross-cutting themes, Nathan is interested in the aesthetics of language use, ecological knowledge and narratives of human-nature spirit interactions.

 

Diego Córdova Nieto
Web Developer, August 2021-present.

Diego Córdova Nieto is a linguist and web developer based in México City, México. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Linguistics from Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana and worked as a web developer at the Instituto de Investigaciones en Matemáticas Aplicadas y Sistemas. He has a background in creating digital projects for indigenous languages. His role at Living Tongues focuses on importing linguistic data for new dictionaries, maintaining the Living Dictionaries platform as well as developing new features for it. 


Jacob Bowdoin
Web Developer, 2018-present.
Jacob Bowdoin is a linguist and web developer who has helped build the Living Dictionaries web application from the ground up. During the course of this developing this large-scale technical project, he contributed to the publication of dozens of digital dictionaries for minority languages around the globe, helped teach many webinars and spearheaded technological innovations that assist in language learning. He holds a Master of Applied Linguistics and Exegesis from Corban University. He is currently based in Taiwan. 


Dr. Alexander Andrason
Coordinator for Documentation in Africa, 2022-present.

Dr. Alexander Andrason has contributed to the description and visibility of under-researched and minority languages in Tanzania (Arusa and Hadza), Zimbabwe (Tjwao), Gambia (Mandinka), and Nigeria (Dza and Mingang Doso). He is currently based in Ghana.

A global nomad, Andrason was brought up in a multilingual environment and has resided in nine European and African countries. A hyper-multilingual whose language repertoire draws on forty languages (ten of which he speaks with native or native-like proficiency), he is a pluri-disciplinary scholar who thrives at disciplines and theories’ crossroads. Andrason is an idealist who fights for the preservation and revitalization of ethnic, cultural, and language minorities.

Andrason holds three doctoral degrees: PhD in Semitic Languages (University Complutense in Madrid), PhD in African Languages (Stellenbosch University), and PhD in General Linguistics (University of Iceland). The scope of his research is broad and includes the areas of linguistics, cognitive science, complexity theory, anthropology, pedagogy, and philosophy. He specializes in (cognitive) linguistics, and its various sub-types, especially, semantics and morphosyntax, sociolinguistics and language contact, typology and grammaticalization theory, language documentation, human-to-animal communication, as well as the so-called “peripheral” grammatical phenomenon such as interjections, onomatopoeias, ideophones, and conative animal calls.

His interests include the Indo-European (Germanic, Slavic, Romance, and Greek), Afro-Asiatic (Semitic, Egyptian, and Chadic) and Niger-Congo (Mande, Adamawa, Kwa, Bantu) families, as well as Nilotic (Maa), Khoe-Kwadi (Eastern Kalahari), and Turkic (Oghuz Turkic) languages. Since 2006, he has been engaged in the documentation and preservation of Wymysorys, a nearly extinct Germanic language spoken in Poland.

Dr. Pamir Gogoi
Researcher in Phonetics, 2023-present

Pamir Gogoi
Dr. Pamir Gogoi received her PhD in Linguistics from University of Florida in 2021, prior to which she received her Masters in Linguistics from the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad (India). Her core areas of interest are Phonetics and Phonology and her research has primarily focused on topics related to voice quality and nasality. She is also the co-founder of a non-profit company called VANI (Vernacular Archive of Northeast India), which aims at creating digital resources and language technology tools for low-resource and endangered languages of Northeast India. She is currently working on analyzing the phonetics of Munda languages such as Sora and Mundari.

Kelsey Bialo
Junior Phonetics Researcher, November 2022-present

Kelsey Bialo graduated from Barnard College with a degree in Linguistics and Education Studies. Her undergraduate thesis research focused on social and political implications for language vitality among non-Mandarin languages of Taiwan, where she worked for two years as a Fulbright English Teaching Fellow. Her linguistic interests include phonetic and phonological description, Austronesian linguistics, language documentation, and language teaching and learning in community-based revitalization. She started her Masters degree at University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa in the Fall of 2023. Under the supervision of phonetician Dr. Luke Horo, Bialo’s role at Living Tongues includes data annotation and analysis in Praat for the Munda languages Sora and Mundari. 

 

Huy Phan
Junior Phonetics Researcher, April 2023-present

Huy Phan graduated from California State University, Long Beach with a Bachelor of Arts in Linguistics.  As a member of the Tây community (Southern Vietnam), Phan’s research revolves around describing and documenting different provincial varieties of the Tây dialect. His undergraduate thesis for the Ronald E. McNair Postbaccalaureate Program, titled ‘Selected aspects of Bến Tre,’ investigated the sound system of a Tây variety spoken in Bến Tre province (Vietnam), offering novel insights on the phonology of Tây and Vietnamese in general. Phan aims to expand the scope of his project on Tây by incorporating phonological and phonetic analysis with discourse-based and sociolinguistic approaches, all of which he is currently exploring throughout his PhD career at University of California, Santa Barbara. Under the supervision of Living Tongues phonetician Dr. Luke Horo, Phan’s current role includes data annotation and analysis in Praat for the Munda languages Sora and Mundari.


Yanzhen (Catherine) Huang
Junior Phonetics Researcher, Sept. 2023 – present

Catherine Huang graduated from Georgetown University with a Master’s of Science in Linguistics. Her main interest is in semantics, with a focus in event semantics, tense, aspect, modality, and evaluativity. Her master’s thesis titled “Evaluativity in Mandarin Verbal-le” investigated the nuanced semantic difference between Mandarin comparative constructions with and without verbal-le. Huang is passionate about the preservation of endangered languages and the documentation of low-resource/understudied languages. She has worked on the grammar of Tutrugbu, an understudied Kwa language spoken in Ghana. She was an intern with Living Tongues in 2020, and has returned as a junior researcher in 2023 to work on Munda languages. Her current role on the phonetics team includes data annotation and analysis in Praat, quality control of annotated data, and automation of the annotation process.

 

Ria Borah Sonowal
Junior Phonetics Researcher, Nov. 2021 –  Sept. 2023

Ria Borah Sonowal graduated from St. Anthony’s College, Shillong, India, where she majored in English Literature. After that, she took up Linguistics for her Master’s degree at Gauhati University, where she graduated in 2021. She speaks four languages fluently: Assamese, English, Bodo and Hindi. She is mainly interested in Austro-Asiatic languages as well as Tibeto-Burman languages. In particular, she aims to research the dialectal variations of the Bodo language spoken in Assam, India. Phonetics and phonology are her main areas of interest in Linguistics. She works closely with Dr. Luke Horo on the Sora phonetics project. Her role includes data collection from the field, data annotation, and analysis in Praat. 

Aman Kumar Singha
Junior Phonetics Researcher, November 2021-April 2023

Aman Kumar Singha completed his Bsc. in Botany at Assam University in India in 2018. He graduated with his Masters degree in Linguistics from Gauhati University in 2021, and is currently enrolled there in the Phd programme in Linguistics. Singha works closely with Dr. Luke Horo on the Sora phonetics project. His role includes data collection from the field, data annotation, and analysis in Praat. 

 

Dr. Ganesh Murmu
Koro Aka Documentation Project, 2008-present

Munda Languages Project, 2007-present
Local Project Coordinator, Jharkhand State (India)

Dr. Ganesh Murmu works at the Department of Tribal and Regional Languages at the University of Ranchi in Jharkhand, India. Dr. Murmu is an expert in the tribal languages of Jharkhand and in particular a tireless advocate and activist for his native Santali language. Between 2008 and 2012, he worked with Dr. Greg Anderson on the Documentation of Koro Aka Project, on the poorly known Koro Aka language of Arunachal Pradesh, northeastern India, and on three Enduring Voices trips to Arunachal Pradesh.

In addition to Koro Aka, Dr. Murmu served as primary or secondary eliciting linguist in the recordings Living Tongues Institute has made of numerous languages of the region, including Hruso Aka, Miji, Apatani, Hill Miri and Nishi. 

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