Arienne Dwyer
Social and Behavioral SciencesArienne M. Dwyer is a Professor of Linguistic Anthropology and Co-Director of the Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Kansas. Her research focuses on language contact and language ideology. She has conducted 20 years of local research with individuals and communities in Inner and Central Asia (on Turkic-Mongolic-Sinitic-Tibetic language contact), and has directed a number of collaborative documentation and archiving projects, including Salar (1991-1993, Fulbright), Kazakh (1993, Fulbright), Uyghur dialectology, language ideology and verb typology (2002-2003, ACLS, 2011-2014, NSF), Salar, Monguor, Baonan and Wutun (2000-2005, 2007-2008 Volkswagen-DOBES), Kyrgyz folklore and language policy (2004 and 2008, respectively, Open Society Institute), and archaic German dialects in Kansas (2005).
Internationally she acts as a consultant on language documentation and multimedia annotation and archiving (IMDI, UNESCO, EMELD), on social science research methods (Open Society Institute, Trace Foundation), has chaired the Linguistic Society of America's Committee on Endangered Language Preservation (CELP), and has organized conferences and summer schools on language resources and technology, the Digital Tools Summit in Linguistics (DTSL), Towards Interoperability in Language Resources (TILR), and Co-Lang 2012: Institute for Language Research.
She is currently working on Middle Turkic (Chaghatay) texts from the Jarring Collection, focusing on healing and medicine and on XML technologies ( https://uyghur.ittc.ku.edu/atmo.html). In addition, she and her research teams continue to enhance a major primary resource on language contact in Inner Asia (Interactive Inner Asia, https://iaia.ittc.ku.edu) and another longitudinal corpus of the Central Asian Uyghur language (Uyghur Light Verbs, https://uyghur.ittc.ku.edu/uylvs.html)
Teaching Interests
- Language contact, language documentation, language revitalization, language ideology
- Digital humanities
- Historical linguistics
- Linguistic typology
- China
- Central Asia
- Uyghur language and culture
- Turkic languages
- Chinese languages
Research
Language Contact and variation (areal processes, linguistic creolization, discourse and ideologies)
Digital Humanities, Corpora, Media Archives, cyberinfrastructure: Methods, tools, cultural practices and standards for analyzing data and representing knowledge; XML, Unicode.
China; Chinese Inner Asia (especially Xinjiang and Qinghai); Kyrgyzstan
Language Endangerment and Revitalization; Less-commonly taught language pedagogy
Sinitic, Turkic, and Mongolic languages
Performance, narratology and ethnopoetics
Research Interests
- Language contact, language documentation, language technology, language ideology
- Digital humanities
- Media archiving
- China
- Central Asia
- Chaghatay
- Uyghur
- Wutun
- Monguor
- Salar
- Baonan
- Kyrgyz
- Language change and climate change.
