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.
Sophia Leung sinhangsophia dot leung at mail dot utoronto dot ca more information
Sophia is an undergraduate student at the University of Toronto, double majoring in Linguistics and Human Geography. Born and raised in Hong Kong, she is a homeland speaker of Cantonese and also speaks Mandarin and English while learning Japanese. She enjoys exploring interdisciplinary themes and the ways in which different fields intersect.
I am a heritage speaker of Cantonese and I graduated from the University of Toronto with a specialist degree in Linguistics and a major in German. I am passionate about language documentation and revitalization, with an interest in phonology and morphology.
Irene Zhuang irene dot zhuang at mail dot utoronto dot ca more information
Irene is an incoming MA student in Linguistics at UofT. She completed her undergraduate degree with a specialization in Linguistics and a major in Psychology, and is interested in language contact, phonological variation, and Chinese syntax. She is a heritage speaker of Mandarin, Cantonese, and Hakka.
Lauretta Cheng lauretta dot cheng at utoronto dot ca more information
Lauretta is a researcher on the HLVC Project with a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Michigan. Her interests are in sociophonetic cognition and language identity and attitudes, particularly on the topics of Asian American/Canadian speech, native speaker ideologies, and Cantonese sound change. She grew up in Vancouver, BC with Cantonese as a heritage language.
Arthur Kao efngpons dot Kao at mail dot utoronto dot ca more information
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.
Athena Manousakas athena dot manousakas at mail dot utoronto dot ca more information
Athena is a second-year undergraduate student specializing in Linguistics with a minor in Spanish. As a heritage speaker of Hungarian and a native speaker of Greek, she hopes to bring a multilingual perspective to her academic work. Her interests lie in cross linguistic comparison and the study of language variation and change.
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
Eliana SanFilippo eliana dot sanfilippo at mail dot utoronto dot ca more information
Eliana is an undergraduate student at the University of Toronto specializing in Literature and Critical Theory and majoring in linguistics. She is interested in contact-based variation and change in Slavic languages, particularly among languages in the Balkan sprachbund. She is a heritage Russian speaker and currently working her way through BCS and Macedonian.
Tagalog
Ukrainian
Editing, web design, analysis, PR, etc.
Hilary Walton Hilary dot Walton at 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.
