about
anna björklund
I am a computational linguist and Californianist with a PhD in linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley. I am currently a linguist on assignment at Meta (contracted by Tundra Technical Solutions), where I work on assessing and improving model performance for the Meta Ray-Ban Smart Glasses voice assistant. I am also a tribal linguist for the Paskenta Band of Nomlaki Indians (since 2020) and the Wintu Tribe of Northern California (since 2022).
My academic specialty is the Wintuan languages of Northern California, where I am particularly focused on the northern branch (Wintu and Nomlaki). My dissertation, A Grammar of Nomlaki, is the first published grammar of the Nomlaki language. My committee members were Keith Johnson, Andrew Garrett, and Gašper Beguš. More broadly, I am interested in language revitalization methodologies for languages without first-language speakers, whose sources are entirely archival. I am particularly committed to applying this knowledge to Wintuan language revitalization.