Jennifer Gómez Menjívar (World Languages and Cultures) and William Salmon (English, Linguistics, and Writing Studies) share this year’s CLA Research Award in the TENURED category for their collaborative research on the linguistic diversity of Belize.
During the January 2017-February 2018 period, they published their co-authored book, Tropical Tongues: Language Ideologies, Endangerment, and Minority Languages in Belize (2018), which is the inaugural volume in the Studies in Latin America series distributed by the University of North Carolina Press. In addition, they co-authored two articles that appeared in prestigious venues: The Oxford University Press journal, Applied Linguistics, in which their “Setting and Language Attitudes in a Creole Context” (2017) appears, has the highest impact factor of all linguistics journals: it is ranked number 1 out of 178 journals. Similarly, the Chicago Linguistic Society, which published their “Attitudes and Endangerment in a Maya Mopan Community” (2017) had a 17.9% acceptance rate.
While bringing to fruition many years of fieldwork in Belize, they have each kept their individual research agendas current. During the period in question, Dr. Gómez Menjívar published “Straight Outta Livingston: Black Indigeneity, Wordsmithing, and Code-Switching in Wingston González’s Poetry” in Transmodernity” (2017), and Dr. Salmon published his “Language Attitudes, Generations, and Identity” (2017) in African and Black Diaspora.