My main research interest is on the historical development of Philippine and Austronesian languages, and how insights from linguistics can be used to reconstruct the deeper culture history of the region.
My most recent research investigated the contact situation between Ibatan and Ilokano on the island of Babuyan Claro, Cagayan, Philippines, particularly correlations between linguistic outcomes of contact-induced change and mechanisms of speaker-driven cross-linguistic influence within a small multilingual community. Understanding contemporary contact outcomes will provide new evidence for investigating ongoing issues in the linguistic history of the Philippines.
I am also deeply involved in an extension project with the Bugkalot communities of Nueva Vizcaya, Quirino, and Aurora, which focuses on a community-led language documentation of Bugkalot, with outputs such as a unified orthography for the Bugkalot varieties, a corpus of spontaneous and elicited speech as well as metalinguistic commentaries, and grammar notes.
