A Summer Spent Sketching…a Grammar
Congratulations to PhD student Leilah Bielser, who spent the summer completing a 16-week summer research internship focused on the grammar of Northern Tutchone, a critically endangered language spoken in central Yukon.
As part of the internship Leilah, working under the supervision of Dr. Chris Cox, had the opportunity to work directly with textual and audiovisual materials, storybooks, elicitation notes, historical linguistic field notes, and more, to contribute to ongoing revitalization efforts for a language with fewer than a dozen first-language speakers.
Describing a language is difficult! I learned this over the summer. It is also very fun so…give it a try.
(Back Row L-R) Michael Rodgers, Don Myles
Leilah is the School’s first Direct Entry PhD in Linguistics and her passion for the topic was evident.
I really fell in love with directionals, so now you get to listen to me talk about them!
Her work also forms part of a larger ongoing multidisciplinary project, the Kwän Dék’án’ Do (Keep the Fire Burning), undertaken by the First Nation of Na-Cho Nyäk Dun, in collaboration with Carleton University and the Office of the Commissioner of Indigenous Languages.
Funding for Leilah’s internship was provided by the annual Carleton University Research Opportunity Program (CUROP), a Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) initiative. Last Thursday, Leilah joined four fellow CUROP 2026 recipients in Dunton Tower to share their research experiences and project outcomes with an audience drawn from across the Faculty. Presentations spanned disciplines from Music and Humanities to History and Psychology, and, of course, Linguistics/Applied Linguistics & Discourse Studies, showcasing the depth of scholarship found in FASS as well as the extent of community engagement evident in its innovative research efforts.