Colleen M Fitzgerald

Colleen Fitzgerald is Professor of Linguistics and Director of the Native American Languages Lab at the University of Texas at Arlington, located in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. She earned her doctorate in linguistics at the University of Arizona, where she first started work with the Tohono O'odham language community. For more than 20 years, she has worked with Native American tribes to document and revitalize their languages. Current projects include co-directing the Oklahoma Breath of Life Workshop, collaborating with the Chickasaw Language Revitalization Program, and teaching in venues such as the American Indian Language Development Institute, workshops put on by the Oklahoma Native Language Association, as well as onsite with various tribal language programs. She provides support to tribes on their language revitalization and documentation projects, including training, technical assistance, and more. Her expertise includes sound systems (phonetics and phonology), endangered languages, language documentation and revitalization, and Native American languages. She recently served as the Director of the 2014 Institute for Collaborative Language Research (CoLang), an institute supporting the documentation, maintenance and conservation of endangered languages.