When? Spring 2026: Every other Wednesday, 3:10PM-4:00PM (alternating with LRWG)
Where? Hybrid Format (in-person in Dwinelle 1303 and via Zoom; email organizers for passcode)
What? We are a working group dedicated to the critical examination of methodologies in language documentation, description, and revitalization, as well as to the linguistic and ethnohistorical analysis that falls out from that work. Our aim is to learn from and ultimately improve upon methods for carrying out more rigorous, insightful and ethical linguistic and cultural documentation, revitalization, and revival, as well as to help researchers implement those methods.
How? Fieldwork Forum is made possible through a Working Group Grant provided by the Townsend Center for the Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley.
Who? FForum is organized by Becky Everson (reverson@berkeley.edu) and Zachary Wellstood (wellstood@berkeley.edu). We welcome all those interested in linguistic fieldwork, with all levels of experience, including those in other departments. To join our mailing list, please write to the organizers.
See a list of our past talks here.
Upcoming Meetings
April 15, 2026: Jasper Jian (Stanford)
How do we learn from variation?
In fieldwork contexts, we encounter variation at many levels: from constrained microvariation between speakers, to pervasive macrovariation between dialects. I will present two case studies from my ex-situ fieldwork with Igbo (Niger-Congo; Nigeria) where I have had to contend with morphosyntactic and phonological variation across different domains. In both case studies, I discuss how explaining observed variation has not only been necessary for thorough description but has also been a source of evidence for theoretical conclusions. This talk aims to highlight the methodological choices that have allowed for variation to be productively incorporated within my ongoing work.
April 29, 2026: Stephanie Farmer
The case for Muniche as an Arawakan language
Muniche is a nearly extinct language of Peruvian Amazonia that has long been considered an isolate. Using data collected from fieldwork in 2009, I argue that Muniche in fact belongs to the Arawakan family. I explore the implications of this claim for the prehistory of the region and discuss the challenges of using the comparative method on an unclassified, sparsely documented language.
Past Meetings
September 3, 2025: Round Robin
Join us for the first FForum meeting of the semester (and year!), where we will do a round robin to catch up on summer fieldwork developments. All are welcome!
September 17, 2025: Becky Jarvis, Andrew Liu, and Katie Russell (UC Berkeley)
Developing community-facing story corpus web resources
In this talk, we will present our work on (two versions of) the Atchan Song and Story Corpus (version 1 live here, and version 2 beta visible here). We’ll discuss background on the project, some technical details of how adding content to the website works, and some currently in-progress work on making it easier to develop similar websites. We welcome discussion throughout this presentation and encourage department members who have worked on or are interested in similar projects to attend.
October 1, 2025: Bernat Bardagil (Ghent University)
October 15, 2025: Nadine Grimm (U. of Rochester)
Tone in grammar and grammar-writing
Tone is often treated as a phonological phenomenon, yet its versatility in marking grammatical categories is well-established, especially in African languages (e.g. Rolle 2018). For instance, in Gyeli (Bantu), tone marks a distinction between the proximal and distal demonstrative paradigms, it distinguishes seven TAM categories and encodes argument structure (Grimm 2021). Tone’s nature to “be everywhere” in Gyeli has largely guided my research agenda for the last decade. In this talk, I reflect on my experience with tone as a fieldworker/linguist/grammar-writer, addressing methodological questions about investigating grammatical functions of tone and grammar writing.
October 29, 2025: Lewis Lawyer (UC Davis)
November 12, 2025: Panel Discussionwith Claudia Iron Hawk (UC Berkeley), Wendy Liz Arbey Lopez Marquez (UC Berkeley), Nafisa Iyatunde Rashid (UC Berkeley), and Hei Vangz (UC Berkeley)
Identity and Fieldwork: Perspectives from Working within our Communities
February 4, 2026: Julianne Kapner (UC Berkeley)
February 18, 2026: CANCELLED
March 4, 2026: RESCHEDULED TO 4/29
March 18, 2026: Panel Discussion with Claudia Iron Hawk (UC Berkeley), Wendy Liz Arbey Lopez Marquez (UC Berkeley), and Hei Vangz (UC Berkeley)
Identity and Fieldwork: Perspectives from Working within our Communities, Part II
April 1, 2026: Adrienne Tsikewa (Independent Scholar)
“Making up words”: Zunglish and language ideologies
Language mixing is a prevailing linguistic practice under conditions of language contact that has been extensively analyzed and theorized by linguists (e.g. Muysken 2000, Bullock & Toribio 2009, Hickey 2020). When one of the languages in contact is English, language mixing results in a variety that “liberally blends elements from English and from one or more local languages” (Schneider 2016: 341). These hybrid English varieties are a global phenomenon and are often referred to by lexical blends that combine English and the local language or community name (e.g. Spanglish, Chinglish, Singlish). Due to the stigma frequently associated with hybrid English (Lambert 2019, Schneider 2016), connotations associated with these terms are predominantly negative, aligning with prevalent language purism ideologies or deficit-based language ideologies of language mixing as poor or broken English. Awareness and understanding of such language ideologies is critical to Native American language contexts, as without this knowledge “scholars and researchers-both Native and non-Native-cannot hope to understand Native American languages and the ways speakers use them, change them, and renew them.”(Kroskrity 2009:10)
In this talk, I present one part of my larger dissertation study on bilingual language practices and ideologies in Zuni Pueblo, New Mexico. My analysis focuses on language ideologies towards Zunglish, or language mixing involving Zuni and English, expressed during interviews with adult participants of various ages and with various levels of ability in the Zuni language. I show that some of the participants express ideologies of deficiency and language purism toward Zunglish, while others view language mixing as a necessity and as a reflection of hon a:wan A:shiwi ‘our Zuni people’ living in two worlds. I conclude by reflecting on how these ideologies can hinder community members, in particular younger generations, from speaking Shiwi’ma/Zuni and how valuing rather than disparaging bilingual practices is essential to creating the conditions for younger speakers to gain confidence in using the language.