Local researchers
One goal of the ELA is to coordinate between local linguists, anthropologists, language activists, and other interested parties to take collective action for the survival and promotion of endangered languages and cultures. The following is a small but growing list of local researchers who are involved in work on endangered languages. Please contact us if your work falls into this category and you are interested in being listed here.
Chris Collins
Chris Collins, professor in the Department of Linguistics at NYU, has worked on the syntax and morphology of the highly endangered Khoisan languages of Southern Africa and continues to do fieldwork on understudied languages of West Africa. Along with John Singler and Daniel Kaufman, he is involved in the Masalit documentation project which was initiated in 2010 within the context of a series of ongoing NYU field methods courses.
Personal page: http://homepages.nyu.edu/~cc116/
Miki Makihara
Miki Makihara, professor at the Department of Anthropology Queens College, is an anthropological linguist who specializes on the Rapa Nui language of Easter Island and its speaker community. She is currently putting together a large scale audio-video corpus of Rapa Nui as spoken by various segments of the population, the first of its kind.
Personal page: http://qcpages.qc.edu/ANTHRO/makihara/makihara.html
John Victor Singler
John Singler, professor in the Department of Linguistics at NYU, is a sociolinguist, creolist, phonologist and Africanist who has investigated various factors in language variation and creolization. He has conducted extensive fieldwork in Liberia and continues to publish on a variety of topics relating to language contact. Along with Chris Collins and Daniel Kaufman, he is involved in the on-going Masalit project.
Personal page: https://files.nyu.edu/jvs1/public/
Damanga Coalition
The Damanga coalition works to promote the human rights of the people of Darfur and to ensure the preservation of their ethnic communities. Daowd Salih, president of the organization, is working with Chris Collins, John Singer, Daniel Kaufman and students from NYU towards a comprehensive description of the Masalit language. We also look forward to begin working with Mohamed Yahya, executive director, on Masalit poetry and oral literature.
Personal page: http://www.damanga.org/
