Stuart J. McGill

Post-doctoral Researcher in Language Documentation (ELAP)

Stuart McGill was a post-doctoral fellow in the Endangered Languages Academic Programme at SOAS. He was particularly interested in the documentation and description of the Kainji languages spoken in northwest Nigeria. These are a mix of endangered and relatively robust (and large) languages, which have nonetheless been largely neglected by linguists. His research interests also lie in the interaction between discourse and grammar, typology, technology and language documentation, and phonology.

Stuart was awarded his PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies in October 2009. His dissertation focused on the alternation between Gender and Person agreement in the Cicipu language (West Kainji), and demonstrated the role that discourse topicality has to play in the distribution of these two paradigms of agreement. During his PhD research, which was funded by a Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Academic Programme bursary, he spent nine months in Nigeria working with Cicipu speakers Markus Yabani and Mohammed Musa. There is a website about the Cicipu language where stories and other recordings are available along with a simple dictionary.

Stuart investigated agreement across a number of West Kainji languages, and plans to carry out further documentation of Cicipu as well as some of the smaller languages in the group.