This blog is focused on my work encouraging language development with the Eastern Congo Group of SIL International. Most of the languages where I work are oral, without an official and/or standard writing system.  While I am interested in a number of aspects of linguistic analysis, my work focuses on phonology, the study of the sound sytem in a given language, generally to the end of helping language communities develop a writing system appropriate to their language.

My training is from SIL schools and the University of Oregon (M.A. 2002), and the orientation of my work is functional and typological.