Sandhya Narayanan

INSTITUTE SPEAKER / PANELIST

Linguistic Anthropologist

Linguistic anthropologist Sandhya Narayanan grew up living between Boston and Toronto, in a multilingual home and in multilingual communities. This experience helped draw her to study how language use and linguistic differences have shaped and continue to influence social and cultural changes in human populations. A National Geographic Society grant funded her work studying indigenous language contact (how languages influence each other over time), multilingualism, and language and culture change along the Lake Titicaca basin on the Peru-Bolivia border—research she continues as a Ph.D. candidate in linguistic anthropology at the University of Michigan.

Supported by a National Science Foundation grant, Narayanan studies Quechua-Aymara language contact in the region, including how social and political changes have affected not only both languages, but also their indigenous speakers and populations. sandhyanarayanan.academia.edu