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Research Scientist at the University of Arizona Awarded Excellence in Community Linguistics award by Linguistic Society of America

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PRESS RELEASE January 15, 2015

Research Scientist at the University of Arizona Awarded Excellence in Community Linguistics award by Linguistic Society of America

Muriel Fisher, a Research Scientist Sr. in the department of Linguistics at the University of Arizona was awarded the Excellence in Community Linguistics Award from the Linguistic Society of America at a ceremony last night at the Arizona Inn in Tucson Arizona.

Ms. Fisher is a native speaker of Scottish Gaelic from the Isle of Skye in Scotland, but now lives in Tucson Arizona. She has spent a life time promoting her native tongue, sharing it with others, and helping develop tools and resources to preserve and promote it.

Ms. Fisher holds the position of Research Scientist Sr. in the Linguistics Department at the University of Arizona, where she has collaborated with a team of faculty and students lead by Dr Andrew Carnie. Funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, this team has been investigating the grammatical properties of Gaelic, through traditional fieldwork and modern experimental methods. In addition, Ms. Fisher works as the Gaelic language instructor in the Critical Languages program at UA and at her own Tucson Gaelic Institute.

Andrew Carnie, Dean of the Graduate College and Professor of Linguistics says the following about the collaboration of his team with Muriel Fisher:

Once we started working with Muriel in traditional elicitation it became clear that she had an innate talent as a linguist. Although she doesn’t have the

technical vocabulary to describe her observations, she often stunned us with her metalinguistic insights about the language. A number of times she figured out what we were looking for and directed us to the right kind of forms without any prompting. She’s patient with the field worker. She helps us understand the cultural context of the materials we’re eliciting. One important aspect of our experience working with her is how she’s helped us train a generation of field-researchers here at University of Arizona – both research assistants and students in our fieldwork class. She has taught them about being respectful and effective in the time they have with speakers, of investigating cultural context and being prepared before elicitation sessions and in dealing with people with little

background in linguistics. Working with native speakers of endangered languages is a delicate and difficult task and Muriel has helped our students understand the challenges that lie underneath it.

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In a similar vein, Sylvia Reed, Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, who worked closely with Ms. Fisher in her dissertation work says of her:

Muriel is the consummate language consultant. She has been teaching the

language for many years, and she has an incredible metaknowledge of how Gaelic works because of this. More than that, though, she has an extraordinary intuitive sense of the workings of Gaelic. She has said that working with us (on the documentation grants) has helped her be a better teacher because she’s been able to understand her language in a different way—but I think what we’ve really given her is labels for concepts she’d already formed and thought about herself. Each summer, Ms. Fisher spends several months at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, the Gaelic College on the Isle of Skye where she shares her knowledge of the language with learners and other Native Speakers through the College’s short programs. Boyd Robertson, Principal of Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, says:

Muriel has a winning way with students and is a very popular and effective tutor. Her classes are fun and she has attracted a great deal of repeat business to the summer programme over the years. There are students who come to Sabhal Mòr specifically for the Muriel Fisher experience. Although not trained in

linguistics, she has an aptitude for language teaching and for explaining even the most esoteric of grammatical points. She has a deep knowledge of island history, heritage and culture which she deploys on bespoke interpretive courses that involve visits to various sites of significance throughout Skye and Lochalsh. The Excellence in Community Linguistics Award from the Linguistic Society of America recognizes the outstanding contributions that members of language communities (typically outside the academic sphere of professional linguists) make for the benefit of their community’s language.

More information about the Excellence in Community Linguistics Award:

http://www.linguisticsociety.org/content/call-nominations-excellence-community-linguistics-award

Official Announcment of the 2015 award:

http://www.linguisticsociety.org/news/2014/09/10/announcing-2015-excellence-community-linguistics-award

For more information about Muriel Fisher, The LSA award, or Linguistics at the University of Arizona please contact Andrew Carnie carnie@email.arizona.edu or at 520 626 8804.

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More about Muriel Fisher:

Muriel grew up in the community of Gleann Dail (Glendale) in the far north end of the Isle of Skye in Scotland. Scottish Gaelic was the only language of her home and community. Her community was remote and extremely poor. In the winter it was not accessible by road, and the community survived by subsistence farming and fishing. The village only got electricity in the late 1950s. When she first went to school, Muriel was monolingual in Gaelic, but the school was conducted entirely in English. Gaelic was not even taught as a subject until the residential high school level. Her accomplishments as a citizen-scholar are all the more remarkable because of the lack of academic training. Like most young people of her community, she fled the poverty of her island, her culture and her language to seek opportunities elsewhere. She worked as a hotel employee, as a farm worker, as an actor and an artist. She set up and ran two different

successful restaurants. She lived in Italy, Mexico, Scotland, and the US. She even lived for a while on the Navajo Nation in New Mexico where she worked as a shepherd.

It wasn’t until much later in her life that she embraced her own cultural heritage and linguistic background. She noticed a demand in the expatriate Scottish community in the US that there was a demand for Gaelic language. However, she was completely illiterate in Gaelic, having received no formal instruction in the language at all. So she, completely on her own, taught herself to read and write in her native language. Then she founded the Tucson Gaelic Institute, where she teaches small groups and private lessons to individuals. She teaches students in Tucson and all over the US via Skype. Her reputation has grown and she was invited to teach extension classes at Pima Community College as well as at immersion weekends through out the US and Canada sponsored by An Cumunn Gàidhealach Ameireaganach (The American Gaelic Society). She also started teaching Gaelic at the University of Arizona through our Critical languages program. She teaches 4 levels of Gaelic at the University. Students who take all 4 levels achieve a clearly functional level of fluency. Note that although she teaches at both College and University level she has no formal training in language teaching nor does she have a university degree. It is a testament to her skills as a language teacher that she has such success. For the past 8 years, Muriel has spent 3 months each summer back on her native Skye teaching short courses at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, the Gaelic College (part of the University of the Highlands and Islands.) There she teaches all level of students, from total beginners to people like herself who are native speakers but who left the island as young adults. Helping lapsed-speakers recover their Gaelic is an important part of language revitalization.

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From Left to Right: Andrew Carnie, Dean of the Graduate College and Professor of Linguistics; Heidi Harley, Professor of Linguistics and representative of the Linguistic Society of America; Muriel Fisher; Simin Karimi, Professor of Linguistics and Linguistics department head.

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Muriel Fisher doing an experiment at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig on the Isle of Skye. (From Left to Right, Micaya Clymer, Jessamyn Schertz, Muriel Fisher)

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