Studying Endangered Languages Earns Aaron Lener a Beinecke Scholarship
Aaron Lener ’27 still remembers the exact moment linguistics stopped being a subject he was curious about and became the work of his life.
As a high school senior sitting in on a historical linguistics class by , associate professor of linguistics in the , Lener heard about the Bantoid languages of West Africa.
By the time classes started that fall, he had a research proposal in hand and a seat on Green’s research team. Three years later, that early spark has grown into a body of work substantial enough to earn him a , one of the most competitive graduate fellowships in the country.
The Beinecke Scholarship provides substantial funding for the graduate education of young people of exceptional promise. It is open to junior-year college students and was created to enable them to be courageous in selecting research or creative-focused courses of graduate study in the arts, humanities or social sciences. Lener was one of 16 Beinecke Scholars selected from a national pool of nominated students in 2026.
Lener’s rĂ©sumĂ© is wide-ranging. He is a double major in linguistic studies and international relations, a member of the RenĂ©e Crown University Honors Program and is a 2026-27 Remembrance Scholar. He has engaged in fieldwork on endangered Nigerian languages, a policy internship in Brussels, Belgium, and a courtroom-observation stint in New York’s court system. During a study abroad semester in Strasbourg, France, he also held a position inside the Council of Europe’s Directorate General of Social Rights, where he researched case law affecting more than 700 million people.
A Family Connection
All of Lener’s work around the power of language traces back to his home. Lener grew up in rural Homer, New York, 35 minutes from the Onondaga Nation, with a great-grandmother born to Mohawk Nation parents.
Hearing family stories about language repression left him, in his words, with “an acute understanding of the dangers of language loss,” an awareness that now animates his research on Jhar and Gwak, two severely understudied Jarawan languages spoken in Nigeria.
As the only syntactician on Green’s team, Lener has spent three years building an analysis of how these languages express negation, working from recordings gathered through WhatsApp calls with native speakers thousands of miles away.
It is at times frustrating work—Lener describes trying to parse grammatical structure over calls with motorcycles in the background—but it has already produced a first-author paper under review at Studies in African Linguistics and presentations at conferences from Cornell to the University of Notre Dame to the Annual Conference on African Linguistics in Buffalo.
Scholarship Based on Experience
Much of Lener’s distinctive scholarship draws on experience outside a linguistics department. His Russian minor, initially a personal interest, turned out to connect directly to his fieldwork.
Much of the foundational theory behind modern syntax emerged from the Russian Formalist movement. Lener has researched that history alongside his African-language work, a link made more urgent, he says, by Russia’s growing military presence in West African nations like Burkina Faso and Niger, not far from where his Jhar and Gwak language consultants live.
A summer with Education International in Brussels had him producing a policy toolkit on mother-tongue education for teachers’ federations across Africa. His work in Strasbourg, reviewing European Social Charter compliance and researching labor protections for platform workers, has little to do with Jarawan syntax on its surface. But Lener sees it as one more facet of the same conviction: that language, whether encoded in grammar or in law, is fundamentally about how people are seen and protected.
After noticing members of his own rural community were struggling to connect with the Spanish-speaking migrant workers who had recently moved there, Lener started a series of community Spanish classes in Homer. He later taught English to refugees from Ukraine, Sudan and Afghanistan through a Syracuse resettlement program. Showing people that unfamiliar languages and cultures “are not scary” is one of the most direct ways to combat the fear that comes from a lack of exposure.
Jolynn Parker, director of Syracuse’s , says Lener has “extraordinary energy, boundless curiosity and a keen analytical mind.”
“Aaron is poised to be a leader in the field of linguistics and to contribute meaningfully to the description and preservation of threatened languages,” she says.
As for the future, Lener is certain he will be using language to make a difference in the world.
“I want to look in the mirror and tell myself, with confidence, that I am doing something good for others,” he says.Ěý
