Dr. Suzanne Gessner

Suzanne Gessner has a BA in French and Linguistics from the University of Regina and an MA and PhD in Linguistics from the University of British Columbia. She first came to the University of Victoria as a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow (2003-2006), and continued with a limited term position in Syntax and First Nations languages (2006-2007). Currently, she teaches courses in UVic’s Indigenous language revitalization programs.

Other courses she teaches include introductory linguistics, phonetics, phonology, syntax, language acquisition, linguistic anthropology and courses about Indigenous languages. Suzanne’s research interests are focused on community-based Indigenous language revitalization in several areas: language policy and language rights; program evaluation and fluency assessment; and latent speakers (receptive bilingualism).

In addition to teaching, she contributes to language revitalization in British Columbia through her work with First Peoples' Cultural Council. Her research is grounded in a community-development approach with the goal of ensuring that research and revitalization strategies result in concrete language revitalization results.

Suzanne has had the privilege of working with speakers of Dene (Athabascan) languages, especially Dakelh (also known as Carrier), a language spoken in central interior British Columbia. She has studied the phonology and phonetics of the stress and tone system of Dakelh, as well as issues in Dakelh morphosyntax including relative clauses, causatives, direct and indirect discourse complements, and wh- questions. She has an ongoing online dictionary project of the Lheidli dialect of Dakelh, with collaborators Bill Poser (UBC) and Chris Coey (UVic).