Professor Juliette Blevins Elected Fellow of Linguistic Society of America

Professor Juliette Blevins (Linguistics), a phonologist and an advocate for endangered and minority languages, was elected a fellow of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) for her “distinguished contributions to the discipline.”
 
The LSA, a nearly 100-year old organization, promotes the scientific study of language.

Blevins is well known for her expertise in Austronesian, Australian Aboriginal, Native American, and Andamanese languages.
 
She is the author of Advances in Proto-Basque Reconstruction with Evidence for the Proto-Indo-European-Euskarian Hypothesis, published last year, in which she argued that the Basque language isn’t unique, but that its roots share a “genetic relationship” with Proto-Indo-European, the ancestral language of most European tongues.
 
The book was covered by the Spanish language news service EFE, leading to features in news outlets around the world, including La Vanguardia, La Prensa, and El Confidencial.
 
Blevins’ first book, Nhanda, an Aboriginal Language of Western Australia, was based on her work with the last speakers of the language. Nhanda has since become dormant. Her book Evolutionary Phonology analyzed the sound patterns and sound change in human language, and presented a new theory synthesizing results in historical linguistics, phonetics, and phonological theory
 
Before joining The Graduate Center in 2010, Blevins was a senior research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. She is the director of The Graduate Center’s Endangered Language Initiative, and has supervised over a dozen doctoral dissertations.