Research assistants conduct field work: recruiting participants,
conducting interviews and working with the data. In addition to acquiring valuable
data from research participants, some research assistants help with transcription,
statistical analysis, audio analysis and development of publicity and outreach
materials for the project.
Steffi Chow Steffisnow dot Chow at mail dot utoronto dot ca more information
Steffi is a fourth-year undergraduate student at the University of Toronto, majoring in Linguistics and French. She is interested in sociolinguistics and multilingualism. She is a fluent speaker in Cantonese, Mandarin, English, and French.
Elyse Wong Elyse dot Wong at mail dot utoronto dot ca more information
Elyse is a second year undergraduate student specializing in linguistics. She is currently interested in language revitalization and social signaling among immigrants and biculturals. She is a heritage speaker of Cantonese from Edmonton, AB.
Arthur Kao efngpons dot Kao at mail dot utoronto dot ca more information
Chengbin Zhou Chengbin dot Zhou at mail dot utoronto dot ca more information
Chengbin is a fourth-year undergraduate student at the University of Toronto, majoring in linguistics and minoring in history and art history. He is interested in research on sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, and philology. He is a fluent speaker of Cantonese, English, and Mandarin.
Siyi Fan Siyi dot Fan at mail dot utoronto dot ca more information
Siyi is an MA Linguistics student at the University of Toronto. Her academic interests lie at the intersection of variationist sociolinguistics and health equity. Siyi's current MA project is dedicated to exploring and analyzing serious illness conversations, particularly those occurring between clinicians who speak Mandarin Chinese as a heritage language and patients who speak Mandarin as a homeland variety.
Justin Leung Justinr dot Leung at mail dot utoronto dot ca more information
Justin is a PhD candidate in Linguistics at U of T. His main interest is in morphosyntactic variation and change, especially in Cantonese, his heritage language, and what it can reveal about the robustness/vulnerability of grammatical structures. In 2021 he completed his MA, working on a project to investigate the expression of motion events in heritage Cantonese, looking at it from sociolinguistic and typological perspectives. Learn more at his website
Faetar
Gray Warriner g dot warriner at mail dot utoronto dot ca more information
Having been interested in linguistics since they can remember, Gray has a broad knowledge of grammatical concepts picked up from languages as distinct as Arabic, Hungarian, and Korean. With knowledge of French, Italian, Spanish, German, Portuguese, Polish, and (as of this year) Catalan. They especially focus on the comparison between the Romance languages. Since the summer of 2023, they have been contributing their knowledge of these languages and their grammar in order to help organize and transcribe Faetar as part of the HLVC project.
James Torangeau j dot torangeau at mail dot utoronto dot ca more information
Hungarian
Marcell Maitinsky marcell dot maitinsky at mail dot utoronto dot ca more information
Marcell is an MA Linguistics student investigating phonetic and phonological variation and change in Heritage Hungarian. He maintains additional interests in the phonetics of emerging technologies, such as voice-user interfaces, and in historical language contact in Northern Eurasia.
Italian
Costanza Vallicelli Costanza dot Vallicelli at mail dot utoronto dot ca more information
Costanza is a PhD student in Linguistics at U of T. She is interested in morphosyntactic variation and change in heritage languages, with a focus on Heritage Italian. Her research explores how variationist and experimental methods can be combined to improve our understanding of language acquisition in the presence of intense language contact. Her work further investigates the role of standardization and language ideology in language maintenance and language shift.
Francesca Lisi Francesca dot Lisi at mail dot utoronto dot ca more information
Francesca is a third-year undergraduate student double majoring in Genetics and Cell & Molecular Biology with a minor in Immunology. She was born in Bari, Italy, and is fluent in Italian and the local dialect. Due to her academic and cultural background, she is interested in coding linguistic data to analyze patterns in Italian varieties and connect with Heritage Italian speakers!
Korean
Polish
Portuguese
Russian
Tagalog
Kathleen Zaragosa kathleen dot zaragosa at mail dot utoronto dot ca more information
Kathleen Zaragosa is an MA student at OISE/UofT studying Language and Literacies Education. Born and raised in Vancouver, she was exposed to Heritage Tagalog and her family's home language, Oasnon, from an early age; she considers herself to be an active learner of both languages. Inspired by this, her thesis focuses on adult children of Filipino immigrants and their experiences with learning and using Philippine languages and cultures in Canada. Since co-founding Sliced Mango Collective in 2021, she has been a cultural worker with a passion for creating community-engaged research and events.
Maria Ramizo mariaadrianne dot ramizo at mail dot utoronto dot ca more information
Pocholo Umbal [Faculty collaborator] p dot umbal at utoronto dot ca more information
Pocholo is a lecturer in the Department of Linguistics at U of T. He was born in Manila, Philippines and grew up in Vancouver, BC. He is fluent in English and Tagalog. His research investigates the role of language contact and ethnic identity in conditioning phonetic variation, particularly within the Filipino speech community in Canada. He is currently contributing heritage and homeland Tagalog data, which can be used for future HLVC studies! Check out his PhD Dissertation about variation and change in (Heritage) Tagalog.
Hilary Walton Hilary dot Walton at mail dot utoronto dot ca more information
Hilary is a PhD candidate in the French Department. Her thesis investigates the role of identity in the L2 acquisition of French speech. She conducts research in the areas of multilingualism, individual differences, phonology, phonetics, and bilingual education, with a special interest in Canadian French Immersion programs.
She is our Lab Manager.
Zakir Muhammad Zakir dot Muhammad at mail dot utoronto dot ca more information
Zakir is a UofT Computer Science undergraduate student from Markham.
He is minoring in Linguistics and Mathematics and is interested in exploring the ways in which CS and Linguistics may overlap. Website
