Hello! I recently graduated with my PhD from the Linguistics Department of the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. My research focuses on sociolinguistics, language revitalization and documentation, and phonetics. More specifically, my dissertation examines sociophonetic variation and language attitudes in the Yiddish spoken by people living in contexts where Yiddish is not the vernacular. I am also interested in lexical variation in Jewish English spoken in Australia and the US, the experiences of diasporic, minoritized, or endangered language communities, and the intersection of ethnobotany and linguistics in the study of Woleaian, a Chuukic language spoken in the Federated States of Micronesia.
My dissertation advisor was Dr. Andrew Cheng, and my committee members were Dr. Amy Schafer and Dr. Andrea Berez-Kroeker from UHM, and Dr. Isaac Bleaman from UC Berkeley.
Feel free to reach out to me at ebreslow [at] hawaii [dot] edu if you have any questions about my research!
June 2026: Paper published in the Journal of Jewish Languages, entitled "Was the Barmi a Shemozzle?: A Comparative Study of Australian and American Familiarity with Jewish English Lexical Items."
May 2026: Earned my PhD from UHM!
April 2026: Defended my dissertation, entitled "Diversity in a diasporic language: Sociolinguistic variation in minority Yiddish contexts."
January 2026: Awarded the Elizabeth Pine Dayton award at the Linguistic Society of America Annual Meeting
November 2025: Paper published in U. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics: Selected Papers from NWAV 52, entitled "Shmooze and Chutzpah: A Lexical Analysis of Sociolinguistic Variation in Australia and the United States."