Ellavina Tsosie Perkins is an independent linguist and scholar of the Navajo language

Navajo language

Navajo or Navaho is an Athabaskan language spoken in the southwestern United States. It is geographically and linguistically one of the Southern Athabaskan languages .Navajo has more speakers than any other Native American language north of the...

.

She was a student of the late MIT linguistics

Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....

 professor Ken Hale

Kenneth L. Hale

Kenneth Locke Hale was a linguist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studied a huge variety of previously unstudied and often endangered languages—especially indigenous languages of North America, Central America and Australia...

. She received her Ph.D.

Ph.D.

A Ph.D. is a Doctor of Philosophy, an academic degree.Ph.D. may also refer to:* Ph.D. , a 1980s British group*Piled Higher and Deeper, a web comic strip*PhD: Phantasy Degree, a Korean comic series* PhD Docbook renderer, an XML renderer...

 from the University of Arizona

University of Arizona

The University of Arizona is a land-grant and space-grant public institution of higher education and research located in Tucson, Arizona, United States. The University of Arizona was the first university in the state of Arizona, founded in 1885...

; her dissertation dealt with word order

Word order

In linguistics, word order typology refers to the study of the order of the syntactic constituents of a language, and how different languages can employ different orders. Correlations between orders found in different syntactic subdomains are also of interest...

 and lexical scope in Navajo.

Perkins is on the board of directors

Board of directors

A board of directors is a body of elected or appointed members who jointly oversee the activities of a company or organization. Other names include board of governors, board of managers, board of regents, board of trustees, and board of visitors...

 of the Navajo Language Academy

Navajo Language Academy

The Navajo Language Academy is a non-profit educational and advocacy organization which focuses on the Navajo language.-Overview:...

, under the auspices of which she is currently collaborating with Theodore B. Fernald

Theodore B. Fernald

Theodore B. Fernald is a linguist and the chair of the Department of Linguistics at Swarthmore College. He is a specialist in syntax and the Navajo language. He is currently collaborating with Ellavina Perkins under the auspices of Swarthmore and the Navajo Language Academy to produce a reference...

 on the Navajo Grammar Project, which aims to produce a reference grammar

Grammar

In linguistics, grammar is the set of structural rules that govern the composition of clauses, phrases, and words in any given natural language. The term refers also to the study of such rules, and this field includes morphology, syntax, and phonology, often complemented by phonetics, semantics,...

 of the Navajo Language

Navajo language

Navajo or Navaho is an Athabaskan language spoken in the southwestern United States. It is geographically and linguistically one of the Southern Athabaskan languages .Navajo has more speakers than any other Native American language north of the...

.
The project received a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities

National Endowment for the Humanities

The National Endowment for the Humanities is an independent federal agency of the United States established by the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965 dedicated to supporting research, education, preservation, and public programs in the humanities. The NEH is located at...