Jonathan David Archer PH.D.

Dr Jon Archer is from the UK and joined PMU in September 2021 and teaches academic writing. His background is in Linguistics and he received his BA in 2005 from the University of Sussex, UK, and his MA in Language Documentation and Description in 2008 and PhD in Linguistics in 2021 from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London.

Dr Archer has 20+ years of experience teaching English as a second language and for academic purposes as well as lecturing in linguistics.

His research interests include language documentation and description, language endangerment, language revitalisation, Tibeto-Burman linguistics, Tibetic languages, information structure, focus structures and their morphosyntax, differential argument/ergative marking and cognitive grammar.

For his PhD, Jon spent three years high in the Himalaya recording, transcribing and describing an endangered language. His thesis provides a grammar of Mùwe Ké, a Tibeto-Burman language of Mugu, Nepal, with less than five thousand speakers and investigates the information-structural notion of focus through the morphosyntax of focus structures in the language.

The specialisation of Language Documentation and Description aims to create a record of endangered languages for future generations in the hope that the outputs – a grammar, dictionary, etc. – will help to maintain or revitalise the language for the speech community and linguists alike. A language dies when it is no longer spoken, resulting in all of the cultural knowledge and the community’s unique world view being lost, a situation best described as ‘culturally devastating’. Imagine what would be lost if Arabic or English died with the culture, history, religion and knowledge having never been documented.

Dr Archer hopes to make a valuable contribution to the students at PMU in order that they may have a high level of the skills necessary to follow their chosen academic pathways.