Ajloun, Jordan | عجلون، الأردن
Andrew Kline
آندرو كلاين
I am currently serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in Timor-Leste. My assignment is as an Engish education teacher at a public secondary school in Venilale, Baucau Municipality. I have been posting stories and insights from my experience on my Substack blog.
I graduated in 2023 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a degree in linguistics and Middle Eastern studies. There my research interests focused on the sociolinguistics of Arabic and other Semitic languages. I am interested in how language-use in the Arab World relates to identity and prestige and the role of dilgossia in daily life.
During the 2022 Fall Semester, I studied advanced Modern Standard Arabic and intermediate Jordanian Colloquial Arabic at the Sijal Institute in Amman, Jordan. Check out a day-in-my-life that I made as part of my work-study with Sijal!
In addition to Semitic languages, I have worked with the Indigenous Menominee language spoken in my home state of Wisconsin as an undergraduate researcher in the Wisconsin Indigenous Language Lab under Professor Monica Macaulay. We presented "Menominee Preverb Ordering Revisted" at the 54th Algonquian Conference in October 2022 (ppt). The full paper is forthcoming (June 2025).
Blog Posts
WIKITONGUES — During my time as an intern at Wikitongues, I wrote two blog posts profiling the work of language activists in Oman and South Africa who had received the non-profit's Language Revitalization Accelerator Grant. My experience talking to activists Said and Moshe was invaluable in developing my perspectives on language loss and dormancy. Read them below:
PEACE CORPS TIMOR-LESTE —Throughout my service as a Peace Corps volunteer in Timor-Leste I wrote about my experience on a Substack blog. See some of the posts below or click the link at the top of the page to see the blog in its entirety.
