Jim Wood, a linguistics major from Nashua, New Hampshire, graduated with a bachelor of arts in December 2006. He became interested in linguistics and the Icelandic language after being stationed in Iceland with the Air Force. Wood performed much of his research over the summer of 2006 with a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF). His work allowed him to learn the different ways that people study register and gave him the chance to examine a wide range of linguistic theory. As he points out, “Understanding these concepts has allowed me to really see how Icelandic is not very different from English in many important respects.” Next fall Jim will begin graduate school at New York University in pursuit of a Ph.D. in linguistics. Someday he hopes to own a summer home in Iceland.
Dr. Naomi Nagy is an associate professor of English and is the coordinator of the linguistics program at the University of New Hampshire, where she has taught for eleven years. She specializes in sociolinguistics, studying variation in how people speak and how that is used to represent identity. Dr. Nagy has worked with six Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) awardees, as well as with several students on honors projects, theses, and independent studies. She was particularly excited working with Jim Wood: “He's making really excellent new connections between different parts of the field of linguistics, and it's been invigorating to follow his exploration,” she commented. Dr. Nagy appreciates Jim’s use of innovative methods and data in researching a source that isn’t commonly looked at—online Icelandic.
Read Jim Wood's research article, The Only Differences are the Words and the Sounds: Register Variation in Modern Written Icelandic >>
