Samantha Prins

About Samantha Prins

I am a PhD candidate at the University of Arizona. My training is in Indigenous language revitalization, North American languages and linguistics, and morphosyntactic theory. My current work focuses on reference-tracking morphology in Algonquian and the intersections of linguistics and community language work.

I hold an MA in Linguistics from the University of Montana and a BA in Linguistics and Spanish from Western Washington University. Before coming to the University of Arizona, I served as the program coordinator for the Institute on Collaborative Language Research (CoLang) 2020 at the University of Montana.

Projects

• CoLang 2024 (Co-directors: Tyler Peterson & Luis Barragan)
• Indigenous Languages of the Americas & Their Structures (Advisor: Diana Archangeli)
• North American Indian Sign Language Video Dictionary (PI: Melanie McKay-Cody)
• Arizona Algonquian Linguistics Group (Advisor: Heidi Harley)
• Shifting Pedagogies for the Navajo Language (PI: Aresta Tsosie-Paddock)
• Arizona Celtic Linguistics Group (Advisor: Andrew Carnie)

Research Interests

• Language Revitalization & Maintenance
• Community-based Research & Documentation
• North American Languages & Linguistics
• Algonquian Languages
• Sign Languages
• Morphosyntax
• Distributed Morphology
• Polysynthesis
• Reference-tracking & Deixis

Selected Publications

To Appear: Saguaro Group. Indigenous Languages of the Americas & Their Structures: Sounds and Gestures. Berlin: Language Science Press.

Bar-el, Leora, Megan Stark, and Samantha Prins. 2021. Resources for and about Indigenous Languages: Examining Online Collections. Sustaining Indigenous Languages: Connecting Communities, Teachers and Scholars, ed. by Lisa Crowshoe, Inge Genee, Mahaliah Peddle, Joslin Smith, and Conor Snoek, 141–155. Northern Arizona University.

Prins, Samantha. 2019. Final vowel devoicing in Blackfoot. [MA Thesis.] University of Montana Dissertations, Theses, and Professional Papers.