Affiliate Faculty
Gary Holton
Affiliate FacultyAlaska Native Language Center
Currently at:
Email: holton@hawaii.edu
As a Professor of Linguistics and Alaska Native Languages, documentary linguist, Gary
has conducted firsthand fieldwork Dene (Athabascan) languages of Alaska and Papuan
languages in eastern Indonesia. His publications include a grammar of the Tobelo language,
dictionaries of Western Pantar and Tanacross, and numerous papers describing the structure
of these languages. Current projects include research on Alaska Native Place Names
and the .
Gary holds a B.S. degree from UAF and a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University
of California, Santa Barbara.
Alessandro Jaker
Affiliate FacultyLinguistics
Currently at: Goyatıkǫ̀ Language Society
Email: amjaker@gmail.com
Alessandro Jaker is a phonologist and descriptive linguist, specializing in two Dene
(Athabaskan) languages spoken in and around Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada:
Wıı̀lıı̀deh Yatıı̀, a dialect of the Tłı̨chǫ (Dogrib) language (ethnologue: DGR)
and Tetsǫ́t'ıné Yatıé (Yellowknife), a dialect of the Dëne Sųłıné (Chipewyan)
language (ethnologue: CHP). He is currently working on a verb grammar of Tetsǫ́t'ıné,
funded by an NSF/NEH Documenting Endangered Languages fellowship, to be published
through ANLC.
Alex received his PhD in linguistics from Stanford University in 2012 and was a postdoctoral
fellow at ANLC from 2013 to 2015, as part of the NSF Polar Postdoc Program.
André Bourcier
Affiliate FacultyLinguistics
Currently at:
Email: abourcier@ynlc.ca | Phone: (867) 668-8820
André Bourcier has been with the in Whitehorse, Yukon for 15 years before becoming Acting Director in September 2015.
His worked previously many years as a consultant in Linguistics and Language Planning
for the Gwich'in and the Inuvialuit of the Northwest Territories.
He received a Ph.D. in Linguistics from Université Laval where his doctoral studies
were supported through a Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada scholarship.
Perry Gilmore
Affiliate FacultyAlaska Native Language Center
Currently at:
Email: pgilmore@email.arizona.edu | Phone: (520) 621-1311
Perry Gilmore, Ph.D. (University of Pennsylvania 1982), a sociolinguist and educational
anthropologist, is professor emerita at the ҹɫ and professor
of Language, Reading and Culture (LRC) and Second Language Acquisition and Teaching
(SLAT) faculty at the University of Arizona. She has conducted communication, language,
and literacy research in a wide variety of urban and rural settings in the United
States, Russia, Africa and Australia. Interest in language and communication has led
her to explore a wide range of questions on the origin, nature, and development of
interaction and communication, including: field studies of non-human primate communication
in the West Indies and East Africa, pidginization and creolization of languages, social
aspects of literacy acquisition, and Indigenous language and culture regenesis.
She is the author of numerous ethnographic studies and co-editor of several major
ethnography collections, including Children In and Out of School: Ethnography and
Education, The Acquisition of Literacy: Ethnographic Perspectives, and Indigenous
Epistemologies and Education: Self-Determination, Anthropology and Human Rights. Gilmore
is a past president of the Council on Anthropology and Education.
Alice Taff
Affiliate FacultyAlaska Native Language Center
Email: alicetaff@gmail.com
Alice Taff works to foster Alaskan language continuity by engaging community members to document language, re-establish situations for language use, and create materials in their languages. Examples of materials are:
- Deg Xinag (Deg Hitʼan, Ingalik Athabascan) -- Deg Xinag narratives
- Tlingit -- Tlingit Conversations
- (Aleut language)
Taff earned her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Washington in 1999. She is immediate past president of the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas. Her current research interest is finding links between ancestral Indigenous language use and health.
John Ritter
Affiliate FacultyAlaska Native Language Center
Currently at:
Email: jritter@ynlc.ca
John Ritter is the founding director of the in Whitehorse. John documents and describes Yukon aboriginal languages, and he participates in the training of Native language instructors and specialists. He is particularly interested in place names and serves on the Yukon Geographical Place Names Board.