Rosa Vallejos Yopán
I am a linguist. I received my Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Oregon
in December 2010. My research is centered in Amazonia, and integrates theoretical and typological linguistics, documentary and descriptive linguistics, and bilingualism in language contact situations. Since 1997, I have been participating in various projects
involving indigenous people from the Amazon, one of the most linguistically
and culturally diverse areas of the world, and also one of the least understood.
For my dissertation I wrote A
Grammar of Kokama-Kokamilla, under the supervision of Spike
Gildea. This grammar, which describes an endangered language spoken by approximately
1000 people in the Peruvian Amazon, was awarded the 2011 Mary Haas Book Award from the Society for the Study of Indigenous Languages of the Americas (SSILA). I started to expand my studies to Secoya, another minimally documented language spoken by the Airo-Pai
in Peru and Ecuador, and to Peruvian Amazonian Spanish, a regional variety that has yet to be documented.