about
anna björklund
I am a linguistics PhD candidate and Senior Data Science Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley with a focus on the Wintuan languages of the northern Sacramento Valley (California, USA). My research is situated in the intersection between phonetics, language revitalization, and deep learning. I have worked as a linguistic consultant with the Paskenta Band of Nomlaki Indians since 2020 and the Wintu Tribe of Northern California since 2022, focusing on language revitalization. The Wintuan languages are among the least documented in North America, with Nomlaki having neither a grammar nor dictionary and less than an hour of spoken audio. My primary research interests are in leveraging archival documentation for the phonetic analysis and grammatical description of these and similarly under-documented languages. I am also interested in exploring how deep learning can be used to supplement language revitalization, particularly in text-to-speech applications.
My upcoming dissertation focuses on Northern Wintuan revitalization in two parts: through 1) a sketch grammar of Nomlaki, and 2) a TTS model of sister language Wintu.
My advisor is Keith Johnson. Andrew Garrett and Gašper Beguš also serve as dissertation committee members.