About Me

Tajk'aneenek! My name is Jonah Bates and I am a teacher and linguist, and with an insatiable curiosity. Since Fall 2020, I am a science teacher at Van Horn High School in the Independence School District, teaching Zoology, Biology, Forensic Science, Earth Science, and Intro to Health Services. I also tutor Algebra, Geometry, Trig, Calculus, Physics and Chemistry. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions or would like to set up tutoring!

During the summers, I am a teacher and research mentor for the STAR 2.0 Program at the Children's Mercy Hospital Research Institute. It is an amazing 6-week intensive program for high schoolers to learn about and participate in biomedical research. Feel free to contact me for help applying. 

I received my MA and PhD in linguistics from the University of Kansas in 2020, and I also have a strong background in physics (BA 2012- MU), chemistry, biology, anthropology, and math.

My dissertation Typology and Analysis of Change in Person Marking Reference (PhD 2020 - KU) investigates diachronic change in the number, person, and clusivity reference of person markers across 10 language families and 430 languages. I track the trajectory of the shifts and posit that the causes for the observed directionality lie in the interaction between the markers' underlying semantic/syntactic architecture and the pragmatics of their use in discourse.