Janis Nuckolls

Janis Nuckolls is an American anthropological linguist and professor of linguistics and English language at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. She spent many years doing field research with a primary focus on the Quechua people in Amazonian Ecuador and their endangered language.

Nuckolls earned her B.A. from the University of Wisconsin and her A.M. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. After first visiting the Amazon in graduate school, Nuckolls has returned for field research for more than 30 years.

Quechua, considered an endangered language, is spoken by between 10,000 and 40,000 people. Nuckolls has published extensively on the sound-symbolic grammar, performance, and cognition in Pastaza Quechua. Her interest includes studying the functions of ideophones, which are words that offer a vivid sensory impression through sound, movement, shape, or action. Nuckolls described it "as painting a word picture–even though they are words, they function as images which communicate not only with sounds but with gestures as well". She has published, among other places, in the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Language in Society, Semiotica, the Annual Review of Anthropology, Latin American Indian Literatures, the Journal of Latin American Lore, Anthropological Linguistics, American Anthropologist, and Philosophical Psychology.

She is married and they have one son and two daughters. She is a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.