Department of Linguistics
andrea.berez [at] hawaii [dot] edu
I am an assistant professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. I’m primarily a documentary linguist specializing in Athabascan (Alaska) and Chimbu-Wahgi (Papua New Guinea) languages. My approach to language description examines field-collected data and archived materials in a discourse-functional theoretical framework. I consider language to be a human behavioral phenomenon to be studied in the context of discourse and society, and I see grammatical structure as a product of the cultural and linguistic practices of the members of a speech community.
I am also dedicated to supporting a technological infrastructure for field linguistics that promotes long-term data sustainability and interoperability, and in my fieldwork I try to bridge the gap between linguistics, archiving, technology and community language activism. To this end, I’m the director of Kaipuleohone, the University of Hawai‘i Digital Language Archive.
I am currently working mainly with speakers of of the Kere and Kuman languages of the New Guinea highlands. Iʻve organized workshops and conferences including the 3rd Annual International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation in addition to a Master Class Series on Biocultural Fieldwork.