Christopher M. Hammerly

Christopher M. Hammerly is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of British Columbia and Director of the Experimental Linguistics and Fieldwork Lab (ELF-Lab). A descendant of the White Earth Nation, his research focuses on Ojibwe (Anishinaabemowin) revitalization through computational linguistics, psycholinguistic experiments, and syntactic theory. His work bridges formal linguistic analysis with applied technologies for Indigenous language preservation.

Education: PhD in Linguistics (UMass Amherst, 2020), BA in Linguistics and BS in Psychology (University of Minnesota, 2014). Research interests include morphosyntax, the syntax-morphology interface, and participatory approaches to language documentation. Recent projects involve developing multilingual speech synthesis systems for Indigenous languages and exploring how prominence effects influence sentence processing in Ojibwe.

His work emphasizes collaboration with Indigenous communities, as seen in participatory design workshops for Ojibwe text-to-speech systems and machine translation tools for verb morphology. Talks and publications address both technical innovations and ethical considerations in revitalizing endangered languages.