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The judging committee for the 2007 round of grants, presided over by our Grants Officer Hakim Elnazarov, has announced the list of successful applicants for the Foundation's Grants. We're pleased to announce the names of the successful applicants here, representing a wide variety of projects around the world. Altogether we decided to award funds to ten applicants whose work appeared to most benefit the speaker communities which are the focus of their research. They are as follows, with awards quoted in US dollars:

Jørgen Rischel (Denmark) "Developing a Mlabri-Thai-English dictionary for practical use" ($800)

Martin Kailie (Sierra Leone) "Documentation of the Banda Language and Culture" ($1140) Shodikhor Yusufbekov (Tajikistan) "Roshorvi language: Transmission of language skills between generations" ($880)

Éva Csató (Sweden) ""Teaching resources for the Karaim Summer School in Trakai [Lithuania] in July 2007)" ($1000)

Olga Lovick, Siri Tuttle, Isabel Nunez (USA) "Upper Tanana grammar resource for teachers" ($923)

Ai-yu (Tracy) Tang (USA/Taiwan) "Truku, Mandarin and English Picture Dictionary" ($500)

Marit Vamarasi (USA) "Rotuman Dictionary and Corpus" ($792)

Nina Sumbatova (Russia) "Traditional texts in Kunki: Reading materials and linguistic database" ($345)

Fatoumata Diallo (Burkina Faso) "Revitalisation of the Tiefo language" ($1000)

Govinda Tumbahang (Nepal) "Orthography management and book writing in Chhatthare Limbu"($700)

This year we had a good response to our call for applications and a good field of applicants. We warmly congratulate the successful applicants and wish them continued success in their language revitalisation and documentation work.

But our pleasure at being able to make this announcement has been tempered with sadness. Just after we made our selection, we received the sad news of the death of our most academically distinguished recipient, Professor Jørgen Rischel of Copenhagen, Denmark. Professor Rischel had intended to carry out a project among the Mlabri speakers of Thailand, developing a Mlabri-Thai-English dictionary for practical use. His interests were wide-ranging, and as the obituary posted below on the Linguist List shows, he is a great loss to linguistics.

Date: Tue, 15 May 2007 15:55:57
From: Peter Bakker
Subject: Obituary: Jørgen Rischel 1934-2005
Jørgen Rischel, professor of linguistics in Copenhagen, Denmark passed away Friday May 10, 2007. He is best known internationally for his descriptive work on Greenlandic, his grammar of Minor Mlabri of Thailand and his analyses of Danish phonology and morphology. He also contributed a considerable body of work on historical linguistics, the history of linguistics, linguistic fieldwork, phonology and links between linguistics and culture.

Christopher Moseley, Treasurer