Graduate Student, Linguistics
PhD Candidate
About
I am a doctoral candidate in linguistics at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, specializing in sociolinguistics and anthropological linguistics with a particular interest in language documentation & conservation and languages of Polynesia.
My doctoral research is on Tokelauan, an endangered Polynesian language spoken in a diaspora that spans from Tokelau to New Zealand, Australia, Sāmoa, to Hawai‘i, and beyond.
My thesis looks at how dialectal variation, language contact, and linguistic ideologies facilitate the negotiation of various identities in a small community managing language shift in the diaspora.
The study focuses on the community of Tokelau people living on Hawai‘i’s island of O‘ahu and the community of practice that has coalesced around the language and culture school Te Lumanaki o Tokelau i Amelika (‘The Future of Tokelau in America’).
Some additional research interests include Oceanic historical linguistics, language and gender in the Southeast United States, Black and Amerindian English in the Southeast, syntax and semantics of modality, and lexicography.
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