Position Title
Assistant Professor
Director, Native American Language Center
Undergraduate Advisor
Dr. Lewis C. Lawyer is a linguist, language revitalizationist, language technologist, and expert in the Indigenous languages of California. His book A Grammar of Patwin (University of Nebraska Press 2021) is the first comprehensive description of the structure of the Patwin (Wintun) language, and is based on his award-winning Ph.D. dissertation (UC Davis 2015). He has also compiled the first full dictionary of a Patwin dialect (privately published by the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation in in 2022), built a tool to aid access to Patwin archival materials (shared privately with the Patwin community at calangdoc.com) and established and led the language program for the Cachil Dehe Band of Wintun Indians (2016–2017). He has also done language revitalization work with other Indigenous languages of California, including Konkow and Mojave. He holds 4 degrees in linguistics and one in music, and is an active member of the Dictionary Society of North America. Before joining the NAS faculty at UC Davis, Dr. Lawyer was the Reference Systems Manager at the Cambridge University Press, where he was in charge of dictionary databases and corpora, and served on the Steering Committee for the Cambridge Dictionary website. His research interests include language description, language revitalization, language technologies, dictionaries, and language typology.
- Ph.D., Linguistics, UC Davis, 2015
- M.A., Linguistics, UC Davis, 2012
- M.Phil., English and Applied Linguistics, University of Cambridge, 2006
- B.A., Linguistics and Music, University of Southern California, 2005
- NEH Documenting Endangered Languages grant, with the Konkow Maidu Cultural Preservation Association: “Resources for the Konkow Language.” (PD-255911-17), 2016–2019. Project Director, 2016–2017.
- NSF DDRIG, Documenting Endangered Languages grant, with Patrick Farrell and Martha Macri: “A description of the Patwin language.” (BCS-1264305), 2013–2014.
- UC Davis & Humanities Graduate Research Award in Linguistics, 2013–2014.
- NAS 107 — Learning Native American Languages
- NAS 208 — Advanced Study of Native American Languages
- Language documentation and description
- Collaborative language revitalization
- Indigenous languages of California
- Wintun/Patwin language
- Lawyer, Lewis C. 2021. A Grammar of Patwin. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1gk4r6f
- Patwin Language Dictionary. 2021. Written by Lewis C. Lawyer in consultation with the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation. Privately published by the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation.
- Nichols, Wendalyn and Lewis C. Lawyer. 2021. Identifying emergent meanings via the Word of the Year process: A case study. Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America 42(2), 57–69.
- McIntosh, Colin, Kory Stamper, Jessica Rundell, Laura Wedgeworth and Lewis C. Lawyer. 2020. Cambridge English Thesaurus. Cambridge University Press. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/thesaurus/
- Lawyer, Lewis C. 2015. A Description of the Patwin Language. Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Davis.
- Lawyer, Lewis C. 2015. Patwin phonemics, phonetics, and phonotactics. International Journal of American Linguistics 81(2), 221–260.
- Lawyer, Lewis C. 2015. The oblique phrase and the order of the relative construction. STUF: Language Typology and Universals 68(4), 515–550.
- Lawyer, Lewis C. 2010. Walman and-verbs and the nature of Walman serialization. In Miriam Butt and Tracy Holloway King, eds. Proceedings of the LFG10 Conference. Stanford, California: CSLI Publications.
- Dictionary Society of North America (DSNA) Awards Committee, 2022–present
- Steering Committee for the Cambridge Universtiy Press Consumer Group “D2L”, 2023–2024
- Steering Committee for the Cambridge Dictionary website, 2017–2024