Maida Percival Print

MaidaPercivalMaida Percival is a graduate student in Linguistics at the University of Toronto. She first became interested in linguistics after she had the opportunity to take a Scottish Gaelic class in high school, taught by someone who was attempting to revive the language in PEI. While an undergraduate student, she took a field linguistics class on Hul’q’umi’num’, a dialect of the Salish language Halkomelem spoken on Vancouver Island. Listening to stories the Hul’q’umi’num’ consultant told in his language, she was particularly fascinated by certain sounds in the language, called glottalized consonants. For her MA at U of T, she decided to pursue this interest in glottalized consonants, and was lucky to be able to coordinate interviews with Dene-speaking community members in Délı̨nę for her project. Glottalized consonants are common to Dene and a number of languages of Canada and a few other parts of the world, but there is still a lot to learn about them. During her PhD at U of T, she intends to investigate glottalized consonants further. One of her main research questions is how variability in the way glottalized consonants are pronounced across languages and within the same language influences how they are heard.