Jacob Bushard

Before describing himself, Jacob would like to remind all reading this that we stand in a graveyard. Language death is always political, and California used to be one of the world's language hot zones with dozens of distinct languages from as many as 20 different language families, making California the most linguistically diverse place in North America. Many of these languages have been reduced to mere handfuls of elderly speakers. Many have gone dormant. This is YOUR government's doing. The contexts that have driven many languages into dormancy around the world over the last 5 centuries continue to exist and will not end without radical changes to our society, economy, and institutions.

Jacob started his undergraduate degree in linguistics at SJSU. While there, he studied abroad for a year at the Complutense University of Madrid. In 2021 he transferred to UC Riverside, and received his bachelor's in linguistics 2023. While there he studied Classical Latin (Indo-European), German (Indo-European), and Cahuilla (Uto-Aztecan).

He's currently an MA student looking to graduate in Spring 2027 and his academic interests are in computational linguistics, psycholinguistics, morphology, typology, language documentation/revitalization, and North American languages.

Outside of his academic work, he serves as the board secretary of a local sex-ed and outreach nonprofit, maintains a small YouTube channel covering his many interests, and hosts the occasional themed movie night.