Olga Kharytonava, PhD

Dr. Olga Kharytonava has a MA and PhD in Linguistics, and M.Ed. in Adult Learning and Global Change. She has taught language and linguistics courses for 15 years at Western, McMaster and University of Toronto. She has a vast experience working with newcomers and studying how language learning affects their ability to integrate in the society. Olga has worked extensively on a linguistic analysis of Turkish compounds with experimental methods using speakers’ acceptability judgments. Her current work includes documenting, analyzing and revitalizing the Kimbundu language spoken on the territory of Angola (Africa). Along with long hours of linguistic transcription and doing local community outreach to raise awareness and inspire action for language preservation, Olga spends her time looking for morphosyntactic patterns in nominal classes and their variation across several Kimbundu dialects.