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.
Tsz Kiu (Ariel) Yeung Ariel dot Yeung at mail dot utoronto dot ca more information
Ariel is a second-year undergraduate student majoring in Linguistics and Psychology. She is interested in Cantonese linguistics, psycholinguistics, and speech disorders + therapy. She is fluent in English, Cantonese, and Mandarin. She hopes to learn more languages in her near future, starting with Japanese :)
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 of 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.
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!
Alexandre is in his fourth year of environmental science at York University. He is a second-generation Portuguese speaker. His ties to the community help him to find and interview Heritage Portuguese speakers for the project.
Hannah is an undergraduate Psychology student at McGill University with a strong interest in sociology and sociolinguistics. Raised in Toronto’s Russian-speaking community, she is passionate about heritage language preservation and works to empower speakers to use their native languages with greater confidence. She is particularly interested in the social dynamics of bilingualism and how language shapes identity and community belonging.
Liza Tsoy liza dot tsoy at mail dot utoronto dot ca more information
Liza is a third-year undergraduate student at the University of Toronto majoring in Linguistics and Computer Science. A native speaker of Russian, she is interested in natural language processing, computational linguistics, and exploring a wide range of topics across linguistics.
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.
Ukrainian
Editing, web design, analysis, PR, etc.
Hilary Walton Hilary dot Walton at mail dot utoronto dot ca more information
Hilary is the Lab Manager for the HLVC Project. She is a postdoctoral researcher in the Linguistics Department. Her research focuses on the role of linguistic identity in the realization of indexical features by heritage language speakers.
Omar Al-Rawi Omar dot Alrawi dot mail at utoronto dot ca more information
Omar Al-Rawi is a recent graduate from the University of Toronto, where he studied linguistics and computer science. His research interests lie at the intersection of these fields, particularly in applying computational methods to advance linguistic research, and integrating knowledge from linguistics to enhance computational approaches in natural language processing.
