Ted Fernald

Ted Fernald is a Professor of Linguistics at Swarthmore College, where he has taught since 1994. He is a founding partner of the Navajo Language Academy (NLA/Diné Bizaad Naalkaah), dedicated to documenting and supporting the Navajo language, and serves as an advisor to Navajo Technical University's (NTU) first Ph.D. program in tribal higher education. His research focuses on Navajo syntax, semantics, and language preservation, with affiliations to Cognitive Science and Linguistics.

Key contributions include co-authoring Diné Bizaad Naalkaah: Navajo Language Investigations with Ken Hale and The Athabaskan Languages with Paul Platero. He received a $442,752 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and National Science Foundation to support NLA's language resources. Fernald collaborates with Navajo elders and scholars through summer workshops and co-developed the Saad Dílzin online Navajo dictionary and grammar resource.

Teaching includes courses on Indigenous languages, Navajo linguistics, and semantics at Swarthmore and NTU. His work bridges academic linguistics with community-driven language revitalization, emphasizing Diné principles in education and research.