Local Organizing Committee

siri-photo Siri Tuttle (Co-director), Associate Professor of Linguistics, Alaska Native Language Center, has been working with Alaskan Athabascan people and studying Alaskan Athabascan languages since 1990, and has taught and done research at the Alaska Native Language Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks since 2004.  She has also studied Navajo, Western and Eastern Apache, Kaska, Ahtna, Tolowa, and Galice Athabascan. Her present projects involve grammatical description in Lower Tanana and Koyukon, discourse and narrative in Ahtna and Lower Tanana, and Lower Tanana song lyrics. 
alice-photo Alice Taff (co-director), PhD, is Research Asst. Prof. of Alaska Native Languages at the University of Alaska Southeast in Juneau, Alaska, USA. She has worked with Unangam Tunuu (Aleut, ale), Deg Xinag (ing), Haida (hdn), and Tlingit (tli) language communities to design, fund, and implement language documentation and revitalization efforts. She is President of the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas and co-director of the Healing Through Language initiative of the Endangered Language Fund.
 nophoto Walkie Charles, Assistant Professor of Yugtun, Alaska Native Language Center.
 holton-photo Gary Holton is Professor of Linguistics and Director of the Alaska Native Language Archive at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. His research focuses on inter-disciplinary approaches to the documentation of Athabascan and Papuan languages and linguistic prehistory. 
 ldk-photo

Lawrence Kaplan is Director of the Alaska Native Language Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and Professor of Linguistics.  For the past thirty years he has studied the Alaskan Inupiaq language as a linguist, working on dictionary compilation, oral history and literature, place names, and vocabulary pertaining to traditional indigenous knowledge.  He is particularly interested in the Bering Strait Inupiaq dialects, with their proximity to Siberian languages as well as to the Central Yupik language on the Alaskan mainland.
 nophoto Anna Berge, Professor of Linguistics, Alaska Native Language Center
kraig-photo Kraig Smyth, Graduate Research Assistant, is a Linguistics MA student at UAF. His research focuses on Alaskan English phonological variance from established proximal dialects of English. Kraig has been working on various Alaskan English projects since 2012, and would like to see this work expanded to cover each of the Englishes spoken in Alaska.
yoko-photo Yoko Kugo, Graduate Research Assistant, is originally from Japan and an international Ph.D. student in the Interdisciplinary Studies program at UAF. Her research focuses on Yup'ik geographic knowledge through documenting and understanding of Yup'ik place names, oral histories, and historical and seasonal travel routes in the Iliamna Lake area in southwest Alaska. At UAF, she has been studying her third language, Central Yup'ik language (Yugtun) for her fieldwork.