Dr. Gail Coelho

Former Post-Doctoral Research Fellow

Gail Coelho was a postdoctoral research fellow in the Endangered Languages Academic Programme (ELAP), where she worked on Betta Kurumba, an understudied South Dravidian language spoken in the Nilgiri Mountains in southern India. She worked on a book manuscript presenting a grammar of Betta Kurumba, expanding upon a description of the language provided in her doctoral dissertation. She also began working on Betta Kurumba ethnobiology, for which she has collected native names for plants and animals, descriptions of traditional uses of natural resources, and folk stories in which animals and plants are anthropomorphized. In previous research, she worked on theoretical analyses of reduplication and lexical stress in a native american language, Thompson River Salish. In addition, her Master’s thesis was a study of social variation in certain contact-derived phenomena in a dialect of Indian English spoken in Madras, India.

Gail completed her PhD in linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin and a Master’s degree in linguistics at the University of Pittsburgh. She also has a Master’s degrees in English Literature and Linguistics from the University of Bombay. She completed a BA in English Literature at Stella Maris College, University of Madras.

Her main research interests were in language documentation, for which she believes that it is particularly important to document a wide range of genres of discourse (stories, songs, riddles, proverbs, etc.) and to document cultural knowledge as it is encoded in language (as, for example, in the study of ethnobiology). Within linguistic theory and description, her interests lie in morphosyntax, phonology, and language contact.