Mary Walworth (PhD 2015), Research Group Leader, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Dr. Mary Walworth earned her PhD in linguistics in our department in 2015, and has since become a leader in linguistic research with speakers of Oceanic languages. She is currently a Research Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, where she leads the Comparative Oceanic Linguistics (CoOL) project.
Mary has long been interested in the relationship between language and culture. “I came from anthropology as an undergraduate, but it was the connection between culture and language that drew me to the Linguistics graduate program at UH.” Mary wrote her dissertation, entitled The Language of Rapa Iti: A Description of a Language in Change, based on her fieldwork on Rapa Iti, the southernmost island of French Polynesia. “When I arrived on Rapa Iti, I realized that there were several varieties of the language being spoken, so my nice, neat documentation project quickly morphed into a sociolinguistic documentation of language change and mixed language use.”
After graduation, Mary spent one year as a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow, during which time she conducted preliminary documentary fieldwork of Mangarevan, another language of French Polynesia. “My work with Mangarevan ended up laying the foundation for my current interest in the historical linguistics of Greater Polynesia.” During that time she also started teaching with the University of French Polynesia in Tahiti. “I really loved working with the students there, who are all from the islands of French Polynesia.”
Mary was then offered a postdoctoral research position at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, in Jena, Germany, to conduct fieldwork in Vanuatu for a research project in the Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution. “I was part of an interdisciplinary team looking broadly at the pre-history of remote Oceania, including how Vanuatu and New Caledonia fit into the history of the Western Pacific.”
In 2020 Mary transitioned from being a postdoctoral researcher to her current position as a Research Group Leader. “In the CoOL project, we look at the whole of Oceanic languages, not just historical relationships between languages but also interacting regularly with speakers.” In her daily work, Mary supervises a team of researchers and students, all of whom are working on questions related to Oceanic languages. She also teaches short, intensive language and culture documentation courses at the University of French Polynesia and the University of New Caledonia. “Ninety percent of the students at these universities are speakers of endangered languages. I bring recording devices with me, and we learn how to make recordings of their family members, then we learn how to transcribe them. It’s real-time language documentation happening in these classes!”
When she is not doing fieldwork or teaching in the Pacific, Mary divides her time between Leipzig and Paris, where she lives with her six year old daughter Isabelle. “Isabelle has been coming with me to the field since she was five months old. She learned how to crawl on a woven mat in a village in Vanuatu. Now that she’s in school, it’s harder to take her with me, but I still hope to bring her with me every summer.”
Mary has a bit of advice for current or future students in the UHM Department of Linguistics. “Really get to know your professors. They are people who have walked the path of linguistics research before you, and they have a lot to share. Don’t be afraid to ask them about their experiences.”
Looking ahead, Mary really hopes to be able to train more speakers of Oceanic languages to conduct linguistic research. “There are so many people who are interested in linguistics, and they really want to be able to collaborate in a deep, academic way. I’d love for us to be able to hand the tools over for the next generation of linguists to be themselves speakers of the languages we study.”