PhD student, Lateef Adeleke, awarded the Donald M. and Janet C. Barnard Fellowship
The Department of Linguistics is proud to celebrate PhD student Lateef Adeleke, who was recently awarded the prestigious Donald M. and Janet C. Barnard Fellowship for the 2025–2026 academic year. The fellowship recognizes Adeleke’s outstanding research, commitment to mentoring, and service to both the department and the broader field of linguistics.
Adeleke is currently leading a fieldwork project in Nigeria as the Principal Investigator on a multi-year grant from the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme (ELDP). His work focuses on the documentation of Uneme, an under-documented Edoid language spoken in Edo State, Nigeria.
Adeleke’s project involves recording naturalistic and procedural texts, eliciting linguistic data, oral histories, traditional blacksmithing vocabulary, and cultural rituals across several Uneme communities. The project also includes training documentation and archiving methods to local researchers, compiling a digital FLEx dictionary, creating an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) system for Uneme, and creating annotated audiovisual corpora to be archived with the Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR) in Berlin.
The fieldwork is deeply interdisciplinary, and Adeleke’s efforts will contribute significantly to increasing our knowledge of how indigenous groups with heritage knowledge adapt to the evolution of technology, social and economic practices. It will also be applicable to the language typologists, sociolinguists, and anthropologists who are interested in studying Edoid prehistory, especially in terms of linguistic internal evidence, ancient occupations, migration, identity, and socio-relations. It will provide insights into how material culture, migration, identity, occupation, and language evolve together.
We commend Lateef for his scholarly dedication and the global impact of his work.