Hacking Language Learning: Dr. Conor Quinn at TEDxDirigo
Dr. Conor McDonough Quinn is a documentary linguist, endangered language revitalization worker, and avid learner and teacher of languages. Raised in Portland, Maine, he has lived at length in Indonesia, China, and Oman, and has worked extensively with several indigenous communities of the Northeast. Learning his own familys endangered heritage language (hint: look at the name) in his early teens gave him a passion for helping others to do the same, and led him to pursue linguistics—somewhat single-mindedly—throughout his academic career. Alongside a hefty set of technical research questions in linguistics, he is currently most interested in developing tools to help speech communities carry out their own linguistic documentation and revitalization work, and in finding new ways to reduce the barriers to learning new languages.
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