Andrew James Garrett (born 1961) is a professor of

linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...

at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

. He specializes in

Indo-European languages The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the northern Indian subcontinent, most of Europe, and the Iranian plateau with additional native branches found in regions such as Sri Lanka, the Maldives, parts of Central Asia (e. ...

, and the languages of

California California () is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States that lies on the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. It borders Oregon to the north, Nevada and Arizona to the east, and shares Mexico–United States border, an ...

, especially

Yurok The Yurok people are an Algic-speaking Indigenous people of California that has existed along the or "Health-kick-wer-roy" (now known as the Klamath River) and on the Pacific coast, from Trinidad south of the Klamath’s mouth almost to Cresc ...

. Garrett received his Ph.D. in linguistics from

Harvard University Harvard University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the History of the Puritans in North America, Puritan clergyma ...

in 1990, with a dissertation titled ''The Syntax of Anatolian Pronominal Clitics''. He is a fellow of the

Linguistic Society of America The Linguistic Society of America (LSA) is a learned society for the field of linguistics. Founded in New York City in 1924, the LSA works to promote the scientific study of language. The society publishes three scholarly journals: ''Language'', ...

. In collaboration with

Leanne Hinton Leanne Hinton (born 28 September 1941) is an American linguist and emerita professor of linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley. Education and career Hinton received her PhD in 1977 from UC San Diego, with a dissertation entitl ...

, Garrett has worked on a project to digitize many of the

Survey of California and Other Indian Languages The Survey of California and Other Indian Languages (originally the Survey of California Indian Languages) at the University of California at Berkeley documents, catalogs, and archives the indigenous languages of the Americas. The survey also hosts ...

records, which are now available through the California Language Archive. A 2015 paper co-authored by Garrett was recognized as the Best Linguistics Paper of the Year. Titled "Ancestry-constrained phylogenetic analysis support the Indo-European steppe hypothesis," (co-authored by Will Chang, David Hall, Chundra Cathcart), it elegantly showed that, when methodological errors are corrected, phylogenetic analysis (which had earlier been used to suggest that the steppe hypothesis was untenable), actually supports the time frame necessary for the steppe hypothesis. In 2023 Garrett published
The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall: Language, Memory, and Indigenous California
" a critical examination of the complex legacies of early Californian anthropology and linguistics for twenty-first-century communities. Garrett is married to another professor at Berkeley, Leslie Kurke.

Awards

*2007 Distinguished Teaching Award, bestowed by the Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate's Committee on Teaching

Bibliography

* Andrew Garrett, Melissa Stoner, Susan Edwards, Jeffrey MacKie-Mason, Nicole Myers-Lim, Benjamin W. Porter, Elaine C. Tennant, and Verna Bowie, ''Native American collections in archives, libraries, and museums at the University of California, Berkeley'' (Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, UC Berkeley, 2019) *Will Chang, David Hall, Chundra Cathcart, Andrew Garrett, "Ancestry-constrained phylogenetic analysis supports the Indo-European steppe hypothesis,"''Language'', Vol. 91, No. 1 (MARCH 2015), pp. 194-244 * ''Basic Yurok'' (Berkeley: Survey of California and Other Indian Languages, 2014) * Dianne Jonas, John Whitman, and Andrew Garrett, eds., ''Grammatical change: Origins, nature, outcomes'' (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) * Lisa Conathan, Andrew Garrett, and Juliette Blevins, compilers, ''Preliminary Yurok dictionary'' (Berkeley: Yurok Language Project, Department of Linguistics, UC Berkeley, 2005) * Andrew Garrett, "The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall: Language, Memory, and Indigenous California" (MIT Press, 2023)

References

1961 births Fellows of the Linguistic Society of America Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences alumni Linguists from the United States Living people University of California, Berkeley College of Letters and Science faculty {{US-linguist-stub