Hilary McMahan

Student Photo
Cohort Year: 2012
Advisor(s): Lenore A. Grenoble
Research Interests: Arctic & American Indigenous Languages, Language Contact & Change, Anthropological Linguistics, Fieldwork

Broadly, my interests lie in the interactions between language structure, culture, and environment. I do research on Arctic and American indigenous languages, language change, language contact and shift, anthropological linguistics and semantics. In particular, most of my work focuses on deixis and spatial language in Kalaallisut, a Yupik-Inuit language spoken in Greenland. My dissertation examines ongoing change in the demonstrative system, through fieldwork in Nuuk, Greenland and in Denmark.