Justin Spence is the former Director of the Native American Language Center. His research on Native American languages draws on data from archival sources and original fieldwork with contemporary speakers. He has published studies exploring historical relationships among the Dene (Athabaskan) languages of California and Oregon, with respect to one another and to the rest of the Dene language family, as well as more recent diachronic developments such as dialect variation and changes attributable to language contact. His work also supports language reclamation efforts through the development of web-based tools such as dictionaries and text corpora.