Nickesha T. Dawkins

Nickesha T. Dawkins, PhD is a Lecturer in the Department of Language Linguistics and Literature at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus. Her research focuses on Acoustics & Articulatory Phonetics, Sociophonetics, Phonology and Language & Gender. Dr. Dawkins has served on the Faculty Board for the Faculty of Medical Sciences as the Faculty Representative for the Faculty of Humanities and Education (FHE) from 2020 to date. She is also a member of the UWI’s Library Committee as the Faculty Representative for the FHE.

She recently completed the translation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights from English to Jamaican Creole for the United Nations via the UWI Cave Hill Translation Bureau. She also worked on the Bible Translation Project for which she created the manual for translating the New Testament Bible into Jamaican Creole.  Before joining the Faculty at the UWI Cave Hill Campus, she was a Tutor and Lecture in Linguistics at the UWI, Mona Campus in the Department of Language, Linguistics and Philosophy (DLLP) for eight (8) years.

Dr. Dawkins’ published works include: “Styling Through Rhyming: Gender and Vowel Variation in Jamaican Dancehall Lyrics” in Contact Languages and Music;  “Gender – based Vowel Use in Jamaican Dancehall Lyrics” in Sargasso; and co-editing the volume Sounds of Advocacy, Language and Liberation: Papers in Honour of Hubert Devonish.

She holds the PhD; M.Phil (Upgraded to Ph.D); and BA degrees in Linguistics from the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus. While at the Masters level, she studied for the summer semester 2009 in at the University of California, Berkeley (UCB), enrolled in the Linguistics Summer Institute.  She was exposed to a speech analysis software called Praat which was very instrumental in the analysis of the data used in her Ph.D. Thesis.