Biography
Kendall Medford is a Ph.D. Candidate in Linguistics at Tulane. She holds a B.A. in Hispanic Linguistics from UNC Chapel Hill and an M.A. in Linguistics from Tulane. Before coming to Tulane, she served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Dominican Republic on the Dominican-Haitian border and received a Fulbright grant for teaching English in Brazil.
Her research explores sociolinguistic variation in Caribbean Spanish dialects, with a focus on the Spanish of the Dominican Republic. She has conducted and published research on language use and dialectal features in the Caribbean music genres of dembow and reggaetón. Her dissertation research focuses on Haitian Creole in the Dominican Republic, examining the role the language plays in the lives of Haitian migrants and their descendants in the country.
For her research, she has received two Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowships from the US Department of Education for the advanced study of Haitian Creole (2021 & 2023) and a Field Research Grant from the Stone Center for Latin American Studies (2022) to carry out fieldwork in the Dominican Republic.
Selected Publications:
2023. Haitian Creole in the Caribbean: Exploring Haitian Sociolinguistic Contact in the Dominican Republic and Cuba. In: Language, Decoloniality, and Social Justice in the Caribbean. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
2022. In the Dominican Republic, Language Barriers Complicate Life for Haitian Migrants. NACLA.