Alice Nichols Starts Internship with Endangered Language Fund

Among those who attended the LSA Meeting in Portland in early January was alumna Alice Nichols. Alice graduated with the BA in Linguistics in June 2011 and was a core member of the team of undergraduate research assistants who contribute so much to the work of the Phonetics and Phonology Lab.

In Portland, Alice was in transition to the east coast, where she is to begin an internship with the Endangered Language Fund in New Haven, Connecticut. The ELF (founded in 1996) works to provide financial support for the documentation, preservation, and revitalization of endangered languages all over the world, providing grants to individuals, tribes, and museums. Grants provided by the ELF have promoted work in over 30 countries and have supported projects such as the development of indigenous radio programs in South Dakota, recording of the last living oral historian of the Shor language of western Siberia, and the establishment of orthographies and literacy materials for teaching programs all over the world.

Alice will be working with Doug Whalen, who is the president of the foundation, a researcher at Haskins Laboratory, and a professor of linguistics at CUNY. At ELF, Alice will focus her efforts in the vital area of fund-raising and in addition, she will be helping to digitize recordings of Tarahumara, a language of northern Mexico’s Sierra Madre Occidental.