Kay Johnson

PhD Student

Whilst staying in the Casamance region of Senegal as part of her BA in French and English at Liverpool University, Kay became interested in learning more about linguistics, language diversity and endangerment.

After a few years in the post-university wilderness doing various temping jobs Kay completed a TEFL course and taught in Spain and then in Brighton. While teaching she also did a year-long course in film-making and went on to work on several short films, music videos and a feature.

The MA in Language Documentation and Description at SOAS enabled Kay to combine her interests in endangered languages, linguistics and media. She completed the MA in 2007. She is now working on her PhD in Field Linguistics. Her PhD thesis will focus on spatial referencing in Ske, an Austronesian language spoken on Pentecost Island in Vanuatu. While there she aims to record documentary materials of linguistic practices in Ske, develop an orthography for the language and work on community projects such as producing dictionaries or pedagogical materials.