Marianne Mithun facts for kids

Marianne Mithun (/mɪˈθuːn/ MIH-thoon; born in 1946) is an American linguist. A linguist is someone who studies languages. She is an expert in American Indian languages and how languages are structured and change over time. She is a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Studying Languages

Professor Mithun started her career by spending a lot of time studying Iroquoian languages. These include languages like Mohawk, Cayuga, and Tuscarora. She earned her PhD in Linguistics from Yale in 1974. Her big research paper was called "A Grammar of Tuscarora."

Her work covers many different areas of language study. These include morphology (how words are built), syntax (how sentences are put together), and discourse (how language is used in conversations). She also studies prosody (the rhythm and sound of speech).

Professor Mithun also looks at language contact (when languages influence each other) and language change (how languages evolve). She studies language documentation, which means recording languages, especially those that are not widely spoken. She has worked on many different languages, but she is especially known for her work on Native American languages.

Besides Iroquoian languages, she has studied languages in California like Central Pomo and the Chumashan languages. She also worked on Central Alaskan Yup'ik and the Austronesian language Kapampangan.

Important Books

Professor Mithun wrote a very important book called The Languages of Native North America. This book gives a full overview of Native American languages. Many people who study languages find it to be an excellent reference. It contains a huge amount of information and examples.

The book is organized in two main parts. First, it looks at different grammatical categories. This includes features common in North America, like polysynthesis, where many parts of a sentence are combined into one long word. Second, the book organizes languages by their family groups.

Professor Mithun and her husband, who was also a linguist named Wallace Chafe, created a special fund. It is called The Wallace Chafe and Marianne Mithun Fund for Research on Understudied Languages. This fund helps university students pay for their projects to record and study languages that are not well-known.

Awards and Leadership

Professor Mithun has held many important leadership roles in the world of linguistics. From 1983 to 1985, she was the first president of the Society for Linguistic Anthropology. She also led the Association for Linguistic Typology from 1999 to 2003. From 2014 to 2015, she was president of The Societas Linguistica Europaea. She is also a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.

In 2002, her book The Languages of Native North America won the Leonard Bloomfield Book Award. This award is given every year by the Linguistic Society of America for the best book in linguistics. In 2008, she became a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America. This is a special honor for linguists.

In 2019, Professor Mithun was the vice president of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA). In 2020, she became the 95th President of the LSA.

In 2021, she received the Neil and Saras Smith Medal for Linguistics from the British Academy. She earned this award for her important research into Native American and Austronesian languages. Her work has greatly helped our understanding of how languages work.

Professor Mithun has also taught at many universities around the world. These include Georgetown, La Trobe, Rice, Stanford, SUNY Albany, Amsterdam, Cagliari, Berkeley, Hamburg, UIUC, UNM, Wake Forest, and Yale.

See also

In Spanish: Marianne Mithun para niños