People

Board of Directors

Kristine Hildebrandt, President
Linguist - Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, IL

Kristine Hildebrandt is Professor of Linguistics at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. She received her Ph.D. in linguistics at the University of California Santa Barbara. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. She specializes in language documentation and conservation of Tibeto-Burman languages of Nepal, with particular interests in tonal phonology, argument structure, speaker-reported language practices and attitudes, spatial visualization of variation, and more generally, in the effects of language contact in multilingual, typologically diverse areas.

Shannon Bischoff, Vice President
Linguist - Purdue University Fort Wayne, IN

Shannon Bischoff received his PhD from the University of Arizona, where he studied with Jane Hill in Anthropology and Heidi Harley in Linguistics. He has worked with Indigenous communities in the US and ethnic language communities in Myanmar/Burma. He has taught for the American Indian Language Development Institute and COLANG. He is Professor of Linguistics at Purdue University’s Fort Wayne campus.

Patrick Smith, Treasurer
Citibank - Delaware

Patrick Smith is an associate at Citibank focusing in Risk Management and Operational Planning. He is new to the linguistics space, and looks forward to applying his financial background to the diverse ELF community. Outside of work, he enjoys hiking, playing poker, and volunteering in his local community of Wilmington, Delaware. Patrick has a Bachelor of Science degree in Finance from the University of Delaware and an MBA from the University of Maryland.

Mizuki Miyashita, Secretary
Linguist - University of Montana

Mizuki Miyashita is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Montana. She received her Ph.D. in linguistics at the University of Arizona; her dissertation was on phonology in Tohono O’odham. Her specialization is documentary linguistics in Blackfoot, and she has recorded folksongs including lullabies, narratives, conversations, and isolate words in Blackfoot. Her current research focuses on documentation and application of rhythm and melody in Blackfoot. She was a co-director of CoLang 2022.

Douglas H. Whalen, Founder & Chair of the Board
Linguist - CUNY; Haskins Laboratories, New Haven, CT

Douglas H. Whalen is a linguist who founded the Endangered Language Fund in 1996. Currently, he is Distinguished Professor in the Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences Program in the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He also has affiliations with the Linguistics Program there, as well as with the Linguistics Department at Yale University. He is also Vice-President of Research at Haskins Laboratories in New Haven, CT. He has worked on the phonetics of several languages, including Navajo, Tahltan, Yoloxóchitl Mixtec, and Arapaho. He also created the Healing Through Language initiative of ELF.

Daryl Baldwin
Director - Myaamia Center, Oxford, OH

Daryl Baldwin is a citizen of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma and currently serves as the Director of the Myaamia Center at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. The Myaamia Center is a unique collaborative effort supported by the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma and Miami University in Oxford, Ohio for the purpose of advancing the language and cultural educational needs of the Myaamia people. In September of 2016, Daryl was awarded a MacArthur fellowship for his creativity in reviving the Myaamia language, his dedication to his tribe, and his contributions to language revitalization worldwide.

Phil Cash Cash
Linguist - University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ

Phil Cash Cash is from the Cayuse and Nez Perce tribal communities of the southern Columbia Plateau. He is a younger speaker of Nez Perce (Sahaptian), an endangered language. He has completed his double doctorate in Linguistics and Anthropology at the University of Arizona.

Joe Baker
Delaware Tribe of Indians, OK

Joe Baker is an artist, educator, and activist who has been working in the field of Native Arts for the past thirty years. Baker graduated from the University of Tulsa with a BFA degree in Design and an MFA in painting and drawing, and completed postgraduate study, Harvard University, Graduate School of Education, MDP Program. He is an enrolled member of the Delaware Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma and Co-Founder and Executive Director of Lenape Center, New York, New York.

Monica Macaulay
Linguist - University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI

Monica Macaulay is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She earned her Ph.D. at UC-Berkeley, where she worked under Leanne Hinton. She has done language documentation and revitalization with Chalcatongo Mixtec, Karuk, and Potawatomi. She has also worked with the Menominee Tribe of Wisconsin since 1998, helping them with language revitalization and reclamation.

Raffaella Zanuttini
Linguist - Yale University

Raffaella Zanuttini is Professor and Chair of Linguistics at Yale. Her research focuses on comparative syntax. Her interest in comparing minimally different languages includes studying the syntactic diversity that exists across varieties of North American English. She is a founding member of the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project, whose goal is to document, describe and analyze the syntax of varieties of English spoken in North America, and to show the relevance of these findings for our understanding of the syntax of human language more generally.

Robert C. Carlsen
Director - Legal Services, Accenture, Danbury, CT

Bob Carlsen is a corporate lawyer at Accenture who focuses on Intellectual Property. He has worked and lived in India and Latin America, and is on the Board of the Maryknoll Lay Missioners, a charitable group sending US citizens abroad to assist in poverty relief and healthcare. He is a graduate of Georgetown University and St. John's School of Law and is fascinated with minority languages. Bob is the author of "Sacred Dust on Crowded Streets", and lives in Danbury, CT with his wife Patti and son Nick.

C.J. Cherryh
Author and Classicist - Spokane, WA

C.J. Cherryh is a science fiction and fantasy author who was written more than 60 books, including multiple Hugo award winners. Last year, she received the Grandmaster Nebula for Lifetime Achievement. She is also a classicist and former teacher of Latin and Ancient Greek. She is a member of the Board of Advisors of the National Space Society. She lives in Spokane with her wife Jane, a fellow science fiction author.

Tony Johnson
Chairman, Chinook Nation - Willapa Bay, WA

Tony Johnson is Chairman of the Chinook Indian Nation and education director of the Shoalwater Bay Indian Tribe. He attended the University of Washington and Central Washington University and directed the Language Program for the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde in Oregon from its beginnings in 1997 until 2010. He acquired the endangered language Chinuk Wawa (Chinook Jargon) from his elders, and he lives on the Willapa River in Washington State with his wife and five children.

Patricia A. Shaw
Linguist, Professor Emerita, University of British Columbia,
Vancouver, Canada

Patricia A. Shaw has worked in close collaboration with several endangered language communities on documentation, on training Indigenous scholars in research and archiving methodologies, and on developing pedagogical materials for language revitalization. She is the Founding Editor of the UBC Press First Nations Languages Series, Founding Director of the UBC First Nations Languages Program, and Director of the BC Breath of Life Archival Institute. She has served as President of SSILA, taught regularly at CoLang, and frequently collaborated as a faculty mentor at the California and the National Breath of Life Archival Institutes.

Advisory Board of Directors

Claire Bowern
Linguist - Yale University

Claire Bowern is Associate Professor of Linguistics at Yale University. She works with the last speakers of Australian languages on language documentation and revitalization, particularly Bardi (from Northwest Australia). She also works extensively on archival materials, making them more accessible to language communities.

Stephanie Fielding
Linguist - Yale University

Stephanie Fielding is a Mohegan linguist. Her work focuses on the resurrection and revitalization of the Mohegan language. She is currently a lecturer in the Department of Linguistics at Yale University.

Noam Chomsky
Linguist, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ

Noam Chomsky is a founder of the fields of modern linguistics and cognitive science. He is also a highly influential social critic, philosopher and activist. He is Institute Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the author of many books on a variety of topics. In 2005, he was voted the world’s leading public intellectual, and a species of bee is named for him.

Advisory Board Members not pictured:

Johanna Nichols
Linguist - University of California, Berkeley, CA

Johanna Nichols is Professor Emerita in the Slavic Department of the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on the languages of the Caucasus, language typology, historical linguistics and language preservation and documentation. Her current work includes documentation of Ingush and Chechen. She is the author of the award-winning book “Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time.”

Ofelia Zepeda
Poet - University of Arizona

Ofelia Zepeda is a Tohono O'odham poet and intellectual. She is Regents' Professor of Tohono O'odham language and linguistics and Director of the American Indian Language Development Institute (AILDI) at the University of Arizona.