Residence
Amherst, MA

Books:
Diné Bizaad, Binahoo'aah:
Rediscovering the Navajo Language

Links:
University of Massachusetts Amherst, Department of Linguistics

Dr. Margaret Speas is a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts. She has an M.A. in Linguistics from the University of Arizona and a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Margaret was introduced to Navajo in the late 1970s, when she worked with Navajo students at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado. As a graduate student, she studied Navajo Linguistics with Professor Ken Hale, and attended several workshops at Diné College. Her Doctoral Dissertation, Adjunctions and Projections in Syntax, examined how Navajo verbal and sentence structures compare and contrast with the structures of other languages around the world. She is also the author of numerous papers on the grammar of Navajo and other languages, such as ‘Person and Point of View in Navajo’ and ‘Null Objects in Functional Projections.’

Over the years, Margaret has worked to help make linguistics accessible and useful to those whose languages are studied by linguists. She has worked with Navajo linguists, and has led numerous workshops for Navajo linguists and Navajo teachers interested in linguistics. Her paper ‘From Rules to Principles in the Study of Navajo Syntax’ explains some of the reasons that linguists have been interested in studying Navajo, and describes how linguistic theory has changed over the past 30 years, partly as a result of insights from the study of languages like Navajo. She is a founding member of the Board of Directors of the Navajo Language Academy, the mission of which is to promote scholarship on the Navajo language and support Navajo teachers in their efforts to ensure that the Navajo language will continue to live in future generations.