American linguist
Juliette Blevins (born 1960) is an American linguist whose work has contributed to the fields of phonology, phonetics, historical linguistics, and typology. She is currently professor of linguistics at the Graduate Center, CUNY.[1]
Career
Blevins received her PhD in linguistics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1985.[2][3]
She worked as the senior research scientist at the department of linguistics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig from 2004-2010. She has also worked as a professor at University of California, Berkeley, University of Luton, University of Western Australia, and University of Texas at Austin before joining the faculty of CUNY in 2010.[4]
Research
Blevins's research spans several sub-disciplines and features Austronesian, Australian Aboriginal, Native American, and Andamanese languages.[5] She is the founder of the approach of Evolutionary phonology.[6] This approach seeks to explain the cross-linguistic similarity of sound patterns by examining the regular processes of sound change. This approach argues that many common sound patterns in contemporary phonologies are not necessarily reflections of underlying universal properties of languages, but rather the result of sound changes that are guided by the common tendencies of language transmission.[6]
In 2001, Blevins published a sketch grammar of Nhanda, based on her work with the last remaining speakers.
Honors
In 2020, Blevins was inducted as a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America.[7]
She is the director of the Endangered Language Initiative,[8] co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance,[2] and a co-founder of the Yurok Language Project.[9]
