Tucker Childs

Professor Childs passed away on January 26, 2021

Courses Taught

• LING 4/512: Phonology
• LING 4/515: Phonetics
• LING 4/517: Language Endangerment
• LING 4/520: Historical Linguistics
• LING 4/532: Sociolinguistics
• LING 4/582: Pidgins and Creoles

Research Projects, Interests & Awards

• Kisi Proverbs 2014-present
• Recipient of the 2017 Kenneth L. Hale Award, first presented in 2002, recognizes scholars who have done outstanding work on the documentation of a particular language or family of languages that is endangered or no longer spoken.
• Prosody, especially (African) tone
• Expressive language and non-core grammar
• Field methods and methodology in general
• Language contact, pidgins and creoles
• Language variation and change, dialectology
• African languages, especially endangered ones
• Documenting the Sherbro language and culture (2015-19)
• Video documentation of the Mani (2011-2013)
• Documenting Kim and Bom (2008-2010)
• Mani Documentation Project (2004-2006)
• Portland Dialect Study (1998-2002)
•  Related Videos
  • A Linguist Preserves Languages With Digital Tools, NYTimes.com (July 27, 2009)
  • Lost Voices: Parts 1-4: "Getting there", "Song and dance", "Palm oil", "The children" (May 13-16, 2009)

Representative Publications

• 2020. Bom-Kim. The Oxford Handbook of African Languages, ed. Rainier Vossen and Gerrit Dimmendaal. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press: 439-450. 
• 2018. Forty-plus years before the mast: My experiences as a field linguist. Word Hunters. Field linguists on fieldwork., ed. by H. Sarvasy & D. Forker, 61-78. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
• 2016. Busy intersections: A framework for revitalization. In Africa's Endangered Languages, ed. by Jason Kandybowicz and Harold Torrence. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.  Ch. 7 - Childs Final.pdf
• 2014. Sound symbolism.  In J.R. Taylor (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of the word. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
• 2013. Doing what (you think) is right in the field: Problematizing the documentation of endangered languages. In R. Vossen & W.H.G. Haacke (Eds.), Lone Tree: Khoisan Studies in the Service of the Koon. Essays in memory of Anthony Traill (pp. 91-108). Cologne, Germany: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag.
• 2010. Language contact in Africa, a selected review.  In R. Hickey (Ed.), Handbook of Language Contact (pp. 695-713). Malden, MA and Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.