
K. David HarrisonSwarthmore College
K. David Harrison
Doctor of Philosophy
UNESCO Chairholder, VinUniversity, Hanoi, Vietnam
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66
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Introduction
Environmental Linguistics
Additional affiliations
December 2021 - present
VinUniversity
Position
- UNESCO Chairholder & Professor
Publications
Publications (66)
No place on earth has as many languages per capita as Vanuatu, with as many as 138 languages in a population of about 350,000. This includes some that are endangered and may disappear, and many that have not yet been scientifically studied. All this makes Vanuatu a Language Hotspot, an ideal place to encounter extreme language diversity, multilingu...
Vietnam has high linguistic diversity, with over 110 languages, many not yet scientifically recorded. The ethnic minority languages are a repository of deep ancestral knowledge about nature which is complementary to scientific knowledge. This includes names for species, taxonomies of relatedness, practical uses (foods and medicines), climate change...
We are pleased to present this special edition of Sociolinguistic Studies devoted to the triadic relation among people, the plants they rely upon and nurture, and the languages they speak. Given the current global recognition of threats to biodiversity, and of the language extinction crisis, it is fitting that a leading sociolinguistics journal sho...
People in the southern Vanuatu islands of Aneityum and Tanna use plants as communication devices, a function which we call ‘message plants’. Certain species of plants are held, worn, or placed in specific locations with the intention of delivering messages with varied semantic content. In the cultural context of southern Vanuatu, message plants ser...
The backpack basket has become an iconic element of Highlanders’ culture in public media and cultural heritage representations in Vietnam. The dominant Vietnamese language in those domains has only one term, gùi, to denote the most common types of ethnic backpack baskets, despite each group creating very diverse basket types. The use of outside ove...
Based on original ethnographic and ethnobotanical research, we share how in the cosmology of Tanna, an island in Vanuatu’s southernmost province of Tafea, the Sun is viewed as a living, interactive being. Our initial interviews explored knowledge and beliefs concerning individual plant species, then subsequent follow-up interviews further explored...
This handbook provides a detailed account of the phenomenon of vowel harmony (VH), a pattern according to which all vowels within a word must agree for some phonological property or properties. VH has been central in the development of phonological theories thanks to its cluster of remarkable properties, notably its typically ‘unbounded’ character...
This handbook provides a detailed account of the phenomenon of vowel harmony (VH), a pattern according to which all vowels within a word must agree for some phonological property or properties. VH has been central in the development of phonological theories thanks to its cluster of remarkable properties, notably its typically ‘unbounded’ character...
In this paper, we explore Bahnar perspectives on the agency of plants and forest, and human–forest relations in Vietnam. The Bahnar are among Vietnam's 54 recognized ethnic minority peoples ¹ , many of whom live in proximity to the forest, gather its resources, and regard it as a spiritual abode in their cosmology. The Bahnar (Ba Na) people who inh...
Wind lore constitutes an important domain of environmental knowledge in eight cultures of southern Vanuatu (Aneityum, Futuna, Aniwa, Nafe, Naka, Netwar, Nanu, and Nahual). Our study reviews previous studies in Oceania which document wind systems as used primarily for long-distance navigation. The named winds of southern Vanuatu are not merely abstr...
Pacific peoples maintain strong traditional ties to their local environments. One noteworthy example of these is the use of “ecological calendars,” in which natural cycles are observed as guides in time-reckoning. In southern Vanuatu, what we here call “calendar plants” represent the majority of signals used in these systems. We recorded 111 distin...
Indigenous knowledge systems that uniquely encode environmental knowledge are vanishing globally in tandem with environmental changes and globalization. In this paper we explore knowledge and uses of the palolo polychaete worms (Palola spp.) in time-reckoning, as documented in the anthropological literature on Polynesia and Melanesia. We then intro...
This paper presents weather magic practices from the islands of Tanna and Aneityum, in southern Vanuatu, and highlights how this phenomenon is a critical domain of Indigenous environmental knowledge, particularly knowledge involving plants. Recent literature suggests that diverse cultural systems, such as music, can be viewed as domains of environm...
Environmental linguistics is an emerging field at the intersection of linguistics and natural sciences. It recognizes the mutual relationship between cultural and ecological diversity, documenting linguistic structures and verbal practices by which speakers conceptualize, encode, and transmit knowledge about the natural world. It surpasses the larg...
We conducted extensive fieldwork in the Tafea Province of Vanuatu from 2014 to 2021 as part of a long-term floristic study of plants and fungi as well as analyses of changes in forest structure and plant diversity in response to the category 5 cyclone Pam. As part of this work, we documented the vernacular names and/or uses of 10 species of lycophy...
What can the Laz language—spoken by a shrinking number of people in Turkey and Georgia, and in diaspora—teach us about linguistic diversity, spatial cognition, healing plants, and cultural resilience? The remarkable papers in Lazuri: An Endangered Language from the Black Sea (Ünlü, 2022), along with other recent work authored by scholars deeply dev...
In this paper, we present the creation myth of Nukuoro, recorded in June 2015 by Johnny Rudolph at Swarthmore College. The Nukuoro text was later translated by the primary author, working with Rudolph during a field trip to Pohnpei in June 2016. The narrative identifies three distinct creation events within the Nukuoro cosmology: the creation of th...
The Language of Hunter-Gatherers - edited by Tom Güldemann February 2020
Recent work with indigenous communities in Vanuatu, and prior work with communities in Siberia, illustrate the connections between language diversity, language survival, and environmental knowledge. A new name for this area of study—"Environmental Linguistics"—is proposed here for the first time.
The Munda languages of South Asia exhibit sound symbolism in their use of mimetic reduplication, to which they devote a surprisingly large percentage of their lexicons, typically upwards of ten percent. We present an extensive empirical typology of mimetic reduplication in seven Munda languages: Ho, Kera Mundari, Kharia, Mundari, Remo (Bondo), Sant...
From the heart of National Geographic comes this expansive guide to the clans, tribes, ethnicities, and peoples of the world. Organized in keeping with our knowledge of the migration of human groups through history, with statistics and a cultural portrait of each ethnic group, the book becomes a fascinating round-the-world tour of customs and tradi...
Proceedings of the 25th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: Special Session on Caucasian, Dravidian, and Turkic Linguistics (2000)
Poster presented at the 20th Manchester Phonology Meeting, University of Manchester.
Technology and the effects of globalization are viewed by some as a threat to small languages. But indigenous language activists, often working in collaboration with linguists, increasingly view digital media as opportunities to expand the domains of their languages, and thus enhance visibility, prestige, and potential transmission. Some of the key...
Part travelogue and part scientist's notebook, The Last Speakers is the poignant chronicle of author K. David Harrison's expeditions around the world to meet with last speakers of vanishing languages. The speakers' eloquent reflections and candid photographs reveal little-known lifeways as well as revitalization efforts to teach disappearing langua...
This volume represents part of an unprecedented and still growing effort to advance, coordinate and disseminate the scientific documentation of endangered languages. As the pace of language extinction increases, linguists and native communities are accelerating their efforts to speak, remember, record, analyze and archive as much as possible of our...
This volume represents part of an unprecedented and still growing effort to advance, coordinate and disseminate the scientific documentation of endangered languages. As the pace of language extinction increases, linguists and native communities are accelerating their efforts to speak, remember, record, analyze and archive as much as possible of our...
As cultures and languages disappear from the Earth at a shocking rate, it becomes all the more urgent for us to know and value the world’s many ethnic identities. National Geographic’s Book of Peoples of the World propels that important quest with concern, authority, and respect. Created by a team of experts, this hands-on resource offers thorough...
Human language is a biological system: All humans are neurologically predisposed to acquire whatever language they are exposed to in their early years. Language itself is socially transmitted. A rich interaction between genetic (brain) structures and social behavior gives rise to what linguists call a "grammar", which is the knowledge (part innate,...
It is commonly agreed by linguists and anthropologists that the majority of languages spoken now around the globe will likely disappear within our lifetime. The phenomenon known as language death has started to accelerate as the world has grown smaller. This extinction of languages, and the knowledge therein, has no parallel in human history. This...
Poster from the 2006 LSA annual meeting.
This paper addresses issues about the grammatical sources of the surface patterns of reduplication. Tuvan provides evidence for a distributed analysis of reduplication that divides the explanation for surface patterns between the morphology and phonology components of grammar. Analy-ses based on Raimy (2000) show that two reduplication patterns in...
The twelve articles in this volume describe Yeniseic, Samoyedic and Siberian Turkic languages as a linguistic complex of great interest to typologists, grammarians, diachronic and synchronic linguists, as well as cultural anthropologists. The articles demonstrate how interdependent the disparate languages spoken in this area actually are. Individua...
The twelve articles in this volume describe Yeniseic, Samoyedic and Siberian Turkic languages as a linguistic complex of great interest to typologists, grammarians, diachronic and synchronic linguists, as well as cultural anthropologists. The articles demonstrate how interdependent the disparate languages spoken in this area actually are. Individua...
Language change has recently come to be seen as a complex dynamical system, along the lines of evolutionary biology and economics, as opposed to previous conceptions as a linear or cyclical system. We model the change of a particular phenomenon, vowel harmony, and look at the conditions under which the trajectory of change matches theoretical and e...
this paper, we propose agentbased simulation as a complementary methodology for examining the feasibility of abstracting parameters through analysis of related languages. Agent-based simulations are a way to model the sort of complex system entailed by the evolution of grammars within a speech community
this paper, we show that current interpretations of Lexicon Optimization (Prince and Smolensky 1993), in particular that of Archiphonemic Underspecification (Inkelas 1995), incorrectly predict the distribution of underspecification in lexical entries. We present cases from three vowel harmony languages in which speakers treat harmonic and disharmon...
0 Introduction This article presents results of fieldwork conducted in July 2003. We present the current state of the Middle Chulym language and speech community, a newly collected annotated text, a report of a native orthography, and some thoughts on the future prospects for the language. The Middle Chulym people speak one of the most critically e...
Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of imagination. —Wittgenstein Abstract The Japanese mimetic lexicon displays a number of phonaesthematic regularities associating phonological features with semantic characteristics. Artificial Neural Net-works can be used to good effect in mapping phonological patterns onto semantic features....
Remo, also known as Bonda, Bondo, and Bondo/Nanga Poroja (in Remo remosam), has several thousand speakers. Remo is known mostly from a few sources, Fernandez (1968), some of which is published as (1983) from the Hill Remo (Mu!"lipa"a) dialect, Ramachandra Rao's phonological materials, Swain's study and Bhattacharya's (1968) brief text and more exte...
Thesis (Ph. D.)--Yale University, 2000. Microfiche.