Born, raised and educated in Berkeley, California, Steven A. Jacobson earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in mathematics at the University of California. Later, he studied Central Yup'ik Eskimo with the late Irene Reed at the University of Alaska in ������Ƶ, and learned much from his wife, Anna, a native speaker, and a writer of the language. Jacobson extended his studies to include Siberian and Naukan Yupik, and comparative Eskimo, with interests in the lexicon, grammar, dialectology, and literature of these languages. He taught university classes in Central Yup'ik for many years, and occasionally in Siberian Yupik, and is the author, co-author, compiler, or editor of a number of dictionaries, grammars, and other studies of the languages.

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Lawrence Kaplan is professor emeritus of Linguistics and director of the Alaska Native Language Center from 2000 to 2018. He has taught courses in Linguistics, such as Introduction to Phonetics and Phonology, Historical Linguistics, and Language Policy and Planning, and also works as a linguist with the Inupiaq Eskimo language, which is spoken in northern Alaska.

Kaplan is compiling dictionaries of Inupiaq as well as working on texts and grammatical explanations for the language. He is also involved with training Inupiaq language and culture instructors and works with programs in Native Language Education that offer degrees intended to prepare Native language teachers from Alaska and Yukon Territory in Canada.

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James Kari retired from ANLC in 1997 but continues to work on several Alaska Native language projects. In the past thirty-five years, he has done extensive linguistic work in many Athabascan languages, including Ahtna, Dena'ina, Koyukon, Deg Hit'an, Holikachuk, Tanana, and Upper Tanana.

Curriculum Vitae

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Jeff Leer's commitment to Alaska Native languages began at age seven when he started to study Tlingit in his hometown, Juneau. In 1973 he became a linguist and teacher at ANLC, and in 1991 he completed his Ph.D. dissertation, The Schetic Categories of the Tlingit Verb, at the University of Chicago. He learned to speak both Tlingit and Alutiiq, and he has done extensive linguistic work in other languages, as well as in the field of comparative Athabascan-Eyak-Tlingit.

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Hishinlai’ received her Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics in 2019. Her research and interests are on Indigenous language learning and teaching, second language acquisition, identity, sociocultural theory, and activity theory. She has worked extensively with Indigenous groups (Athabascan, Haida, Tlingit, Alutiiq, Inupiaq, Yup’ik and Aleut) throughout Alaska and Canada.

André Bourcier has been with the  in Whitehorse, Yukon for 15 years before becoming Acting Director in September 2015. His worked previously many years as a consultant in Linguistics and Language Planning for the Gwich'in and the Inuvialuit of the Northwest Territories.

He received a Ph.D. in Linguistics from Université Laval where his doctoral studies were supported through a Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada scholarship.

Perry Gilmore, Ph.D. (University of Pennsylvania 1982), a sociolinguist and educational anthropologist, is professor emerita at the ������Ƶ and professor of Language, Reading and Culture (LRC) and Second Language Acquisition and Teaching (SLAT) faculty at the University of Arizona. She has conducted communication, language, and literacy research in a wide variety of urban and rural settings in the United States, Russia, Africa and Australia. Interest in language and communication has led her to explore a wide range of questions on the origin, nature, and development of interaction and communication, including: field studies of non-human primate communication in the West Indies and East Africa, pidginization and creolization of languages, social aspects of literacy acquisition, and Indigenous language and culture regenesis.

She is the author of numerous ethnographic studies and co-editor of several major ethnography collections, including Children In and Out of School: Ethnography and Education, The Acquisition of Literacy: Ethnographic Perspectives, and Indigenous Epistemologies and Education: Self-Determination, Anthropology and Human Rights. Gilmore is a past president of the Council on Anthropology and Education.

As a Professor of Linguistics and Alaska Native Languages, documentary linguist, Gary has conducted firsthand fieldwork Dene (Athabascan) languages of Alaska and Papuan languages in eastern Indonesia. His publications include a grammar of the Tobelo language, dictionaries of Western Pantar and Tanacross, and numerous papers describing the structure of these languages. Current projects include research on  and the .

Gary holds a B.S. degree from UAF and a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Alessandro Jaker is a phonologist and descriptive linguist, specializing in two Dene (Athabaskan) languages spoken in and around Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada: Wıı̀lıı̀deh Yatıı̀, a dialect of the Tłı̨chǫ (Dogrib) language (ethnologue: DGR) and Tetsǫ́t'ıné Yatıé (Yellowknife), a dialect of the Dëne Sųłıné (Chipewyan) language (ethnologue: CHP). He is currently working on a verb grammar of Tetsǫ́t'ıné, funded by an NSF/NEH Documenting Endangered Languages fellowship, to be published through ANLC.

Alex received his PhD in linguistics from Stanford University in 2012 and was a postdoctoral fellow at ANLC from 2013 to 2015, as part of the NSF Polar Postdoc Program.

John Ritter is the founding director of the  in Whitehorse. John documents and describes Yukon aboriginal languages, and he participates in the training of Native language instructors and specialists. He is particularly interested in place names and serves on the Yukon Geographical Place Names Board.

Alice Taff works to foster Alaskan language continuity by engaging community members to document language, re-establish situations for language use, and create materials in their languages. Examples of materials are:

• Deg Xinag (Deg Hitʼan, Ingalik Athabascan) --  Deg Xinag narratives
• Tlingit --  Tlingit Conversations
•  (Aleut language)

Taff earned her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Washington in 1999. She is immediate past president of the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas. Her current research interest is finding links between ancestral Indigenous language use and health.

 

Publications

Siri Tuttle is a linguist and professor specializing in Navajo linguistics, Athabaskan languages, phonetics, phonology, and language documentation. She currently serves as Professor of Navajo Linguistics at Navajo Technical University, where she has taught since 2021. 

She served as director of the UAF Alaska Native Language Center from 2018 to 2021, after working as director of the Alaska Native Language Archive and Associate Professor of ANLC since 2003.