Many of us can only dream of taking a year off to pursue our deepest passion. Yet for Kathryn Fennig (’07), of the Honors Program, this dream is now coming true. This spring, Kathryn was selected as the 2007 winner of the Joanna Jackson Goldman Memorial Prize (created by Dr. Eric Goldman in honor of his wife, a 1943 graduate of Miami), which provides her with over $26,000 in funding to support a scholarly project of her choosing for one year.

Ms. Fennig a Linguistics and Spanish major, will spend a year studying the acquisition of the African language Ndau by speakers of English and Portuguese. Fennig, a senior majoring in linguistics and in Spanish, will spend 10 months conducting research in Mozambique, which, along with Zimbabwe, is home to the 2.7 million speakers of Ndau, a Bantu language of the Niger-Congo family. “Despite the relatively high number of native speakers that this language enjoys, there is very little in the way of literature relating to any of its linguistic phenomena,” says Fennig. “African languages in general have until recently been left behind in the field of linguistics.” As a permanent resident of Mozambique from an infant through age 13, Fennig is prepared to research, live and travel there during her study. She will be learning Ndau along with her study groups. Her goals are to publish two scholarly articles and to write a manual intended to aid in learning Ndau. “This study will ultimately promote learning, training and teaching of Ndau,” she says.

Kathryn became interested in her “dream” project for two main reasons. It presents a very interesting linguistic problem: “it is inordinately difficult for speakers of non-African languages to learn Ndau once they are adults. I was interested in knowing why this should be…this is a case-specific way of addressing a universally important issue that many linguists debate — that is, what goes on or should go on in our brains when we’re learning a second language?” Secondly, Ndau “is a language which I often heard as a child, and it will probably not survive in the long run even though it has…two million speakers. … I am personally interested in making some effort to preserve a range of linguistic and cultural aspects of Ndau through this study.”

Her goals are to publish two scholarly articles and to write a manual intended to aid in learning Ndau. “This study will ultimately promote learning, training and teaching of Ndau,” she says. During the final two months of her study she will work with Miami faculty mentor Eva Rodriguez Gonzalez (Spanish and Portuguese).

She is currently studying at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid, Spain, through the Institute for the International Education of Students (IES) program.