Muriel Fisher, recipient of the LSA's 2015 Excellence in Community Linguistics Award for her work with Scottish Gaelic, was officially presented with the award at a recent ceremony in Tucson, Arizona. Heidi Harley, LSA Executive Committee member and Professor of Linguistics at the University of Arizona, was on hand to present the award to Fisher on behalf of the LSA.

Left to right: Andrew Carnie, Dean of the University of Arizona Graduate College and Professor of Linguistics; Heidi Harley; Muriel Fisher; Simin Karimi, University of Arizona Linguistics department head.

The Excellence in Community Linguistics Award "recognizes the outstanding contributions that members of language communities (typically outside the academic sphere of professional linguists) make for the benefit of their community’s language". Sylvia Reed, Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois, had the following words of praise for Fisher:

Muriel is the consummate language consultant. She has been teaching the language for many years, and she has an incredible metaknowledge of how Gaelic works because of this. More than that, though, she has an extraordinary intuitive sense of the workings of Gaelic. She has said that working with us (on the documentation grants) has helped her be a better teacher because she’s been able to understand her language in a different way—but I think what we’ve really given her is labels for concepts she’d already formed and thought about herself.

Muriel Fisher is the second recipient of the Excellence in Community Linguistics Award, following Mary Ann Metallic of the Listuguj Education Directorate in 2014. More information about the ceremony and Fisher's life and work are available in a press release from the University of Arizona Linguistics Department.