Meg Harvey
I’m a researcher in the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative at Brown University. I strive to combine community and theoretical goals in my work.
Primary Research Interests
- Language documentation, maintenance, and revitalization
- Reawakening languages
- Remote language documentation methods
- Language revitalization and language variation
- Morphology and its interfaces
- Mayan linguistics (particularly Quichean languages)
- Native American languages and linguistics
- Uto-Aztecan languages
- Video games and language acquisition
Research
Hiaki Language Research and Documentation
I have worked with the Hiaki Language Research group at the UofA since 2018. My main focuses are Hiaki morphophonology, deixis, and writing language lessons for the second textbook volume. Heidi Harley and I are also looking at plurality in Hiaki as part of the NSF grant Compositional Morphosemantics of Plurality.
Uspanteko
I have worked with Ryan Bennett and Robert Henderson on the Uspanteko language since 2017. The majority of our work focuses on tone and intonation in Uspanteko, the only Guatemalan Mayan language currently described as having lexical tone. We have also published Uspanteko narratives and run capacity-building workshops at the Comunidad Lingüística Uspanteka.
Documenting Reawakening Languages
My dissertation focuses on creating a framework for documenting reawakening languages that centers revitalization efforts while still documenting data that’s effective for analysis and description. In particular, I describe documenting the Tunica language as it is currently spoken and adapting this documentation into pedagogical materials. The next step of this project is creating an archive of Tunica as it reawakens, which will include both audio recorded for this project and pedagogical materials created by the Kuhpani Yoyani Luhchi Yoroni (the Tunica Language Project) and the Tunica-Biloxi Language and Culture Revitalization Program.
Publications
2023. Rowinataworu Luhchi Yoroni (Tunica Language Textbook)
with Kuhpani Yoyani Luhchi Yoroni (KYLY, no first author). Bloomington, IN. Indiana University Press.
2022. Centering Revitalization in Remote Documentation Work
with Remo Nitschke, Jennifer Medina, Gabriela de la Cruz-Sánchez, Damian Yukio , Romero Diaz, Florian Hafner, Luis Irizarry, Jesús González Franco, John Powell, George-Michael Pescaru. Coyote Papers (the Proceedings of the Arizona Linguistics Circle 15) Tucson, AZ. University of Arizona Press.
2022. The phonetics and phonology of Uspanteko (Mayan)
with Bennett, Ryan, Meg Harvey, Robert Henderson, Tomás Alberto Méndez López. Language and Linguistics Compass.
2022. Tonal variability and marginal contrast: Lexical pitch accent in Uspanteko
with Ryan Bennett and Robert Henderson. Prosody and prosodic interfaces, eds. Haruo Kubozono, Junko Itô, and Armin Mester. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
2021. Hiaki Echo Vowels are a Floating Glottal Feature
with Heidi Harley. in the proceedings of the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics 37. Somerville, MA. Cascadilla Press.
2019. The Interaction of Tone and Intonation in Uspanteko
with Ryan Bennett and Robert Henderson. in the Proceedings of the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS).
2023. Vowel deletion as grammatically controlled gestural overlap in Uspanteko
with Ryan Bennett and Robert Henderson. Language, Vol 99, No 3.
Meg Harvey 