Arienne Dwyer

Arienne Dwyer is a professor of Linguistic Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Kansas, where she also serves as co-director of the KU Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities. She earned her PhD in 1996 in Altaic and Chinese Linguistics at the University of Washington. Dwyer served as co-director of the 2012 Institute on Collaborative Language Research (CoLang 2012), with Carlos Nash. CoLang, formerly known as InField, is an international training workshop in field linguistics and language documentation supported by the National Science Foundation. Dwyer conducts research into the languages and cultures of Inner and Central Asia, especially languages in the Turkic, Sinitic, and Mongolian families. She has published pedagogical and linguistic materials for the Uyghur language. Her research is significant in arguing for the areal significance of Chinese Inner Asia as a Sprachbund, a region of language convergence. Her research also looks at issues of language death. In 2014, this work led to her being named a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Dwyer, A.M. 1998. “The texture of tongues: Languages and power in China,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics.

Dwyer, A.M. 2005. The Xinjiang conflict: Uyghur identity, language policy, and political discourse. Washington, D.C.: East-West Center.

Dwyer, A.M. 2006. "Ethics and Practicalities of cooperative fieldwork and analysis,” In N. P. Himmelmann, Essentials of Language Documentation. Walter de Gruyter.

Harrison, D., D. S. Rood and A. Dwyer.2008. Lessons from Documented Endangered Languages. Philadelphia/Amsterdam: John Benjamins.