Tucker Childs

Professor of Applied Linguistics

Research Interests

• Prosody, especially (African) tone
• Expressive language and non-core grammar
• Field methods and methodology in general
• Language contact
• Language variation and change, dialectology
• African languages

Courses Taught

• Phonetics
• Phonology
• Sociolinguistics
• Introduction to Language and Society
• Historical and Comparative Linguistics
• Pidgins and Creoles
• Topic: Black English (African American Vernacular English - AAVE)
• Topic: Field Methods
• Topic: Language Contact
• Topic: Language Variation
• Topic: Language and Gender
• Topic: Language Endangerment
• Topic: Language Typology

Research Projects

• Portland Dialect Study
• Mani Documentation Project (2004-2006)
• Documenting Kim and Bom (2008-2010)
• Kisi proverbs
• Video documentation of the Mani (2011-13) - website in progress

Related Videos

• "Documenting dying languages in West Africa", talk given as part of the Berglund Round Table Series, University of the Pacific
• Youtube - Lost Voices: Pt 1 on VOA's In Focus
• Youtube - Lost Voices: Pt 2 on VOA's In Focus
• Youtube - Lost Voices: Pt 3 on VOA's In Focus
• Youtube - Lost Voices: Pt 4 on VOA's In Focus
• A Linguist Preserves Languages With Digital Tools - NYTimes.com

Related Websites 

Studies in African Linguistics (Childs is editor) e-SAL

The Sociolinguistic Documentation of Endangered African Languages (an NSF-sponsored workshop to encourage collaboration among researchers, co-directed with Jeff Good, Buffalo) Workshop on sociolinguistic language documentation in Africa held at WOCAL 7, Buea, Cameroon, World Congress of African Linguistics (WOCAL) - HOME

Representative Publications

• 2010. Language contact in Africa, a selected review. In Handbook of Language Contact, ed. Raymond Hickey, 695-713. Malden, MA and Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.
• 2007. Let’s speak Mani! / Parlons mani ! Portland, OR: Real Estate Publishers, Inc. (Distributed to speech communities in Guinea and Sierra Leone, April 2009.)
• 2004. The S-AUX-O-V syntagm in the Atlantic languages. Studies in African Linguistics 33:1-41.
• 2003b. An Introduction to African Languages. Amsterdam and Philadelphia, USA: John Benjamins.
• 2001. Research on ideophones, whither hence? The need for a social theory of ideophones. In Ideophones, eds. F. K. Erhard Voeltz and Christa Killian-Hatz, 63-73. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins
• 1997. The status of Isicamtho, an Nguni-based urban variety of Soweto. In Pidgins and Creoles: Structure and Status, eds. Arthur K. Spears and Donald Winford, 341-370. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
• Expressiveness in contact situations: the fate of African ideophones. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 9:257-282.
• 2011. A Grammar of Mani. New York and Berlin: de Gruyter

Contact

• childst@pdx.edu