Graduate student Trent Ukasick is the first recipient of the Arienne Dwyer Language Documentation Award, made possible by a fund generously established in 2022 by UW Linguistics affiliate faculty member, Arienne Dwyer.
Ukasick will receive $500 from the fund to assist with dissertation research expenses. He plans to spend most of 2023-2024 documenting the under-studied Gyegu dialect of Khams Tibetan (khg), which is spoken in Yushu City, Qinghai, People’s Republic of China. Ukasick’s dissertation, supervised by Sharon Hargus, is currently planned to include chapters on the tonal system, focus, and sentence-final particles, as well as a grammar sketch.
Ukasick’s dissertation project is also intended to meet the needs and goals of the community themselves. Part of his dissertation study involves the creation of a corpus of audio and video data, already underway through collaboration with Gyegu Khams native speaker Cairen Lhayong, a March 2021 MATESL graduate from University of Washington, who also served as the language consultant for a Spring 2021 field methods class in the Department of Linguistics.