I graduated in 2006 with a special major in Anthropological Linguistics. I'm currently finishing up my second year as a grad student in the linguistics program at Rutgers. I'm primarily interested in phonology, and I've been writing my first qualifying paper on the phonology of click consonants and the typology of how clicks do (or don't) appear in different languages.

I'm also working as a research assistant on a project to document and describe two endangered languages spoken in the Niger delta area of southern Nigeria, Defaka & Nkoroo. The morphology and syntax of these languages is going to be the basis for my second qualifying paper -- many sub-saharan African languages have noun class systems, but Defaka is one of only a couple languages in all of West Africa with a masculine/feminine grammatical gender system. If we can figure out how that situation came about, we might find out some interesting things about how and why some languages combine different types of things into grammatical categories, which in turn could tell us something deep about how human Language works. (That's the long term goal, of course - for now, we're mostly just making recordings before the languages become extinct).

My website is at: eden.rutgers.edu/~bennettw/