NSU professor’s book wins Linguistic Award

(Tahlequah, Oklahoma) -- Northeastern State University associate professor of English Dr. Bradley Montgomery-Anderson was awarded with the Linguistic Society of Americas Leonard Bloomfield Book Award for 2017 for his work Cherokee Reference Grammar. The award was presented during a ceremony at the LSA Annual Meeting in Austin, Texas on Jan. 7.

First presented in 1992, this award recognizes a volume that makes an outstanding contribution of enduring value to our understanding of language and linguistics.

In the recommendation for the award, the Leonard Bloomfield Book Award Committee noted that Cherokee Reference Grammar is the first major reference work in more than 35 years on the Cherokee language. They described the reference grammar book as carefully structured to be accessible to students and scholars engaged in language revitalization regardless of formal background.

Montgomery-Anderson said the book was originally his PhD dissertation when he was a student at the University of Kansas.

I wanted my dissertation to be a work that could have practical application for Cherokee language revitalization.

He said this book involved working with Cherokee speakers in Lawrence, Kansas and Tahlequah for many years.

After I finished the dissertation, I kept working on it to make it more user-friendly, so it ended up feeling like writing two dissertations. The whole process was made a lot easier by the wonderful Cherokee speakers I was able to work with.

Montgomery-Anderson said it was exciting to receive this award.

It was very humbling because the previous winners are well-known professors that I look up to. It was also exciting because this is the second award the book has receivedlast spring it was awarded the James Mooney Prize from the Southern Anthropological Society.