I am often asked, by linguists and lay-people alike, why I decided to pursue a career in linguistics. This question, regrettably, is one for which I have never been able to furnish a suitable answer. The study and documentation of the world’s languages has simply always been a fascination of mine, as long as I can reasonably remember; correspondingly, not long after I discovered that an entire academic field existed dedicated to this very study, I resolved to apply myself to it.

After completing my International Baccalaureate diploma in 2018 in Halifax, Nova Scotia and receiving a parting scholarship, I moved to Edmonton, Alberta to pursue a B.A. in linguistics (minoring in anthropology) from the eponymous University of Alberta, and quickly took an interest in morphosyntax and semantics. In my second year, I had the good fortune of taking a course on global writing systems offered by Dr. Antti Arppe, through whom I took my first steps into involvement in practical language documentation work in November 2019. This first foray into ‘real’ linguistic work involved sifting through hundreds of hours of raw audio recordings of Plains Cree to mark the positions of individual words and sentences of note, and providing (prewritten) annotations of the transcribed and translated forms of these words and sentences. Ultimately, I ended up annotating 124 recording sessions, totalling well over 600 hours of raw audio, over the course of my first two years working on the project.

Over the course of late 2019 and early 2020, I became increasingly involved with the language documentation work being performed by Dr. Arppe and his research group, the Alberta Language Technology Lab. In May 2020, I was awarded the Roger S. Smith Undergraduate Researcher Award, a scholarship worth $5000, to pursue research in Plains Cree lexical semantics. This project involved manually reviewing all 21 345 entries in the largest Plains Cree dictionary of the time and providing semantic classifications to each entry, in order to allow the contents of the dictionary to be organised by meaning, rather than simply alphabetically. During this time, I also began experimenting with vector semantics, a computational method for assigning semantic classes to lexical items, which eventually yielded several publications (including my Honours thesis) concerning the application of the method to classification entries in bilingual dictionaries of Plains Cree, as well as several other Indigenous Canadian languages. 

In spring of 2021, I began working on the Maskwacîs Speech Database, manually reviewing each of the 20 300 entries in the database to standardise the written forms of the Cree transcriptions, to provide morphological analyses for each entry, and to standardise the English glossing conventions. Later in that year, I also began working with native Cree speakers in Maskwacîs, Alberta (primarily Rose Makinaw) to review the audio recordings of the entries in the database, as well as to add any missing or underspecified English definitions, and to elicit novel vocabulary and example sentences. This native speaker ‘validation’ process for the Maskwacîs Speech Database remains in progress.

In summer of 2021, I received the Undergraduate Research Initiative Stipend, a scholarship worth $6000, to author an English translation of the Dictionnaire de la langue des Cris, a late 19th century French missionary dictionary of Plains Cree which, due to being written in French, was inaccessible to most Plains Cree communities, the majority of which now speak (often only) English. This translation process took several months, ultimately resulting in all 11 411 entries in the dictionary being translated and digitised by hand, with the resulting translation being made freely available online.

In winter of 2022