Andrea Berez

The folks at the LINGUIST List asked me to write an alumna letter for this year's Fund Drive, letting you know what I've been up to lately. Even though it's only been about 18 months since I left the LINGUIST crew, I'm more than happy to oblige. It doesn't feel like all that long since I wrote my last fund drive letter to you all!

I finished my M.A. in linguistics from Wayne State University in 2006, and that fall I enrolled as a PhD student in the linguistics department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. I'm now in my second year here at UCSB, where my classmates are brilliant, the faculty are world-class, and the landscape is breathtaking.

My previous work as a member of the LINGUIST crew has had a weighty influence on my research at the PhD level. As an employee of the LINGUIST List, I spent three semesters and parts of two summers up in Alaska working on the Dena'ina Archiving, Training & Access project, which was an NSF-funded project to the LINGUIST List and the Alaska Native Language Center in Fairbanks. My interest in Athabaskan languages and linguistic fieldwork developed while I was there, and I'm still interested in both. Last summer I went back to Alaska to hunt down old recordings of spontaneous Dena'ina conversation (with some generous assistance from the Jacobs Fund and the Robert Oswalt Endangered Languages Fund). This coming summer I'm planning to go to Alaska's Copper River valley to begin fieldwork on the Ahtna language, which will be the subject of my (eventual) dissertation.

I still read the LINGUIST postings every day--as you all know, it's the premier source of information for finding out about the happenings in the linguistic world. Some fascinating new projects have been going on at LINGUIST since I left: Multi-Tree, a searchable database of language relationship hypotheses that uses an eye-popping "star-tree" display; and LL-MAP, a geographic information system designed to aggregate geolinguistic data from a range of sources.

I am still in contact with members of the current LL crew--some of the hardest-working folks I know--and with Helen and Anthony, who are like a second set of parents to all of us. I'm lucky to know all of them, and luckier still to have had the opportunity to work alongside them. Being part of the LINGUIST List family was an experience of immeasurable value and has been instrumental in shaping my future. And I have all of you to thank for that, since your yearly donations to the LL Fund Drive are what keeps the organization going and allows LL to train linguists who, like me, feel enormous gratitude to the field.

With many thanks,

Andrea

See Andrea's homepage at http://www.uweb.ucsb.edu/~aberez/

See Andrea's LINGUIST List personal page while she was a crew member!