Research

For my dissertation, I am examining sociophonetic variation amongst members of the Yiddishist community, a community of non-native and native speakers and learners who engage with the language for secular, cultural, or ideological reasons. I am interested in how this variation comes about despite most speakers being exposed to standardized academic Yiddish, and how it patterns based on identities and language attitudes.

This project, in collaboration with Caroline Hendy, explores how Jewish and non-Jewish Australians and Americans use English that comes from Jewish languages, especially Yiddish and Hebrew. We are drafting a manuscript based on our online survey of 611 participants.

Shown here is the portion of analysis focusing on two words with various possible meanings: shmooze and chutzpah.

This portion of analysis will be published this fall in U. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics, Volume 31.2: Selected Papers from NWAV 52.

This project seeks to expand documentation of ethnobotanical knowledge in Woleaian, a Chuukic language spoken on the islands of Eauripik and Woleai in the Federated States of Micronesia. In particular, I analyze patterns in the naming and usage of roughly 110 plants. This project works with diasporic members of the Woleaian community located in Honolulu, and therefore develops methods for plant name documentation in diaspora.