Projects

Ladino en Kaza is a project that adds a new resource to our toolkit of many Ladino revitalization strategies. It supports Ladino learners to designate an area of their home (currently, the kitchen or bathroom) as a “language nest” where they regularly use Ladino in their daily lives, drawing on the method of at-home language nesting developed by Zahir (2018) for the Lushootseed language. Building a "nest" for Ladino in our houses carves out much-needed space to speak the language, helps learners integrate the language into their daily lives, and brings the language back home — a site of routine, ritual, socialization, family, and joy!

The website for this project, ladinoenkaza.com, hosts daily activities ("domains") for learners in the kitchen and bathroom, audio recordings by the amazing Rachel Bortnick, commentary on variation across Ladino dialects, a how-to guide, a searchable vocabulary list, and more.

This project has been generously supported by the UC Berkeley Department of Linguistics, the UC Berkeley Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures, the Sultan Program in Arab Studies, the Berkeley Language Center, and the Center for Jewish Studies. It was named the Manadero del Mez (resource of the month) by the American Ladino League in April 2025!

An article on this project and its theoretical underpinnings is forthcoming in Letras Hispanas.

Ladino in Istanbul has spent 500 years in heavy contact with Turkish and over a century in contact with French. It's a remarkable, fruitful case for the study of loanword integration: do speakers adapt borrowed words into native Judeo-Spanish grammatical systems? If so, how and how often?

This project, my MPhil dissertation at the University of Oxford, drew on data from the invaluable Ladino Database Project (LDP), a corpus recorded in Turkey by the Sephardic Center of Istanbul between 2008-2010. The dissertation offered a description of morphosyntactic integration patterns in Turkish and French lexical borrowings of four word classes (verbs, nouns, adjectives, and adverbs), with reference throughout to the possible social and linguistic factors affecting those patterns. What emerged —  I think! — is a picture of the diverse Istanbul speaker community in contact: borrowing, adapting, and preserving Ladino all at once.

The thesis received a Distinction from the Oxford Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics and can be read for free here.

I presented a preliminary version of this project at ucLADINO in 2019, and a more developed version featuring new quantitative analysis at the Spanish in Contact with Other Languages conference in 2023.

DIALLS (Dialogue and Argumentation for Cultural Literacy Learning in Schools) was an European Commission Horizon 2020 project across nine countries which researched pedagogies and produced tools for teaching cultural literacy to children in schools. We understood cultural literacy to be the capacity to overcome prejudice, practice inclusion, and to listen and talk across cultural difference. I served as a Research Assistant based at the University of Cambridge Faculty of Education from April 2020-May 2021, until the end of the grant.

Our website has a wealth of innovative and free resources for teachers and educators in 12 languages (English, French, Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese, Finnish, Lithuanian, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, and Welsh), but the lesson plans can be carried out in any language since they are based on wordless films.

I led the coding and qualitative analysis of our English-language linguistic data from classrooms for a co-authored paper: Children's exploration of the concepts of home and belonging: Capturing views from five European countries (International Journal of Educational Research, 2021).