Professor Susan Penfield

Susan Penfield received her Ph.D. in Linguistic Anthropology from the University of Arizona where she is now a Senior Lecturer in the English Department and a faculty affiliate for the Second Language Acquisition and Teaching Ph.D. Program. She has been involved with community language planning for over thirty years. Her special interest is primarily with North American Indigenous languages and she is actively involved in research on language documentation, language revitalization, Indigenous languages and technology and community-based language/linguistic training. Her recent work in language documentation has been with Mohave which has about 30 remaining speakers and Chemehuevi, less than five remaining speakers. This work has been fully supported by both the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities and is a collaborative project which engages and trains community members in all aspects of the documentation process, from data collection to database construction. Susan frequently teaches for the American Indian Language Development Institute where she has initiated courses in Indigenous Languages and Technology and more recently in grant writing and language documentation. Her work with language and technology was supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and resulted in a book, Technology-enhanced Language Revitalization, with Philip Cash Cash and a listserv titled “Indigenous Languages and Technology (ILAT)” which now has over 200 members world-wide. Susan’s passion is for training community members to work on their own heritage languages as she strongly believes that the vitality of endangered languages can only be fully restored through community-based activities. She is currently a consultant for a number of communities where language documentation is forming the basis for strong revitalization activities, notably the Colorado River Indian Tribes in Arizona and the Coushatta community in Louisiana.