Devin Tankersley

PhD in Linguistics from the University of New Mexico.

I’m a linguist interested in how the most basic building blocks of a language are utilized to make larger structures (words, phrases, and so on), and how we use these structures to systematically create and understand meaning. Read more about me here.

My research primarily focuses on signed languages, and I recently concluded field work to document dialectal variation in Taiwan Sign Language as a Fulbright Fellow. I recently defended my dissertation at UNM, supported by the Bilinksi Fellowship. Learn more about this project here and check my blog to see updates.

Click this link to see my CV.

Recent updates

An experiment in linguistic tourism: my first trip to Iceland

In this post, I want to talk about my goals for linguistic tourism and my first experience with trying to go on such a trip. I came up with the idea for linguistic...

Bidirectional road sign in Taiwan

An interesting fact about Chinese writing is that it can be written in a variety of directions: traditionally it was written exclusively in vertical columns going...

Introducing this blog & website

I’m writing this first blog entry as a sort of introduction to what I hope to accomplish with this blog and website because I have yet to successfully have a blog...