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December 7, 2025

Berkeley linguists @ LSA 2026

Congratulations to the Berkeley linguists who will be presenting at the 2026 meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in New Orleans:

  • Riley VanMeter: "Translation and Grammaticalization in Neapolitan: A Comparative Romance Analysis"
  • Ben Papadopoulos: "Reimagining the Canon of Linguistic Theory"
  • Jordan J. Tudisco: "For a Truly Sexy Linguistics: Centering Transness and Rejecting Anti-Trans Antagonism"
  • Jennifer Kaplan: "Going Local: Category Violence and the Provincialization of Identity"
  • Katherine Russell: "The typology of contrastive nasality: The case of Kwa"
  • Akil Ismael: "Ternary Vowel Length Alternations in Shilluk"
  • Eve Fleisig, Nikolai Schwarz, Veronica Grajeda, Abigail Roberts, Rhosean Asmah, and Nicole Holliday: "Identity and Personality in Social Perception of OpenAI's Synthesized Voices"
  • Naomi Schroeter and Julian Vargo: "Suprasegmental and Vocalic Variation in Ladino"
  • Anna Knall, Deborah Foucault (UMass Amherst), and Adina Camelia Bleotu (UBucharest): "Anaphora Resolution of Romanian One in Early Child Language: The Role of Morphosyntactic Gender"
  • Line Mikkelsen, Ellen Thrane (Umiaq, Kalaallit Illuutaat), and Grethe Schmidt (Umiaq, Kalaallit Illuutaat): "Focus, Q-particles and prosodic inversion"
  • Line Mikkelsen, Emily Clem (UC San Diego), Grethe Schmidt (Umiaq, Kalaallit Illuutaat), and Ellen Thrane (Umiaq, Kalaallit Illuutaat): "Reverse prolepsis in Kalaallisut"
  • Kai Schenck and Alexandra M. Pfiffner: "PHOIBLE inventories suggest that diachrony contributes to the appearance of feature economy"
  • Julian Vargo: "Anticipatory Vowel Nasalization in Catalan"

Please let us know if any presentations are missing from this list, so that we can update this story on our departmental website.

Holliday publishes in JASA

Nicole Holliday recently published an article entitled "Socially prescriptive speech technologies: Linguistic, technical, and ethical issues" in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

December 5, 2025

Linguistics events this week (Dec 5-12, 2025)

In and around the Department of Linguistics in the next week:

December 3, 2025

CLA updates

Here's the latest from the California Language Archive:

Russell talk in Edinburgh

Katie Russell presented a talk on "The typology of contrastive nasality: The case of Kwa" at the Seventh Edinburgh Symposium on Historical Phonology (ESPH) in Edinburgh, Scotland, which took place December 1-2.

December 2, 2025

SEI presents at 2025 Unicode Technology Workshop

Members of the Script Encoding Initiative (SEI) gave multiple talks at this year's Unicode Technology Workshop, held in Mountain View, CA. Topics by SEI's network included: "Assessing a Script's Unicode Readiness," "Guidelines for Handling Unstandardized and Undeciphered Scripts in Unicode," "Capturing Script Dynamism: The Indic Case," and more.

A reflection on the event is available on SEI's blog.

December 1, 2025

O'Hagan featured in UC Berkeley Instagram reel

California Language Archive manager Zachary O'Hagan and the CLA were featured in a news reel released by UC Berkeley's Office of Communications & Public Affairs on Thanksgiving Day:

Congratulations, Zach!

Russell publishes in Phonology

Congratulations to Katie Russell, whose article "A corpus-based study of variation in and extension of two Paraguayan Guaraní nasalisation patterns" was just published in Phonology.

Johnson visit to UBC

Keith Johnson visited the University of British Columbia on November 19-21 and presented a half-day workshop on "Doing Phonetics in Python" and a research talk on his joint project with Alexandra Pfiffner, "Voices of Oakland: Accent Variation in an Urban Landscape."

Johnson publishes in Nature

Keith Johnson was part of a team that recently published an article on language-specific neural phonetic processing in the journal Nature.

November 30, 2025

Yurok language workshop at Berkeley

On Friday, November 21, Andrew Garrett, Leanne Hinton, Tyler Lee-Wynant, and Madeleine Strait hosted Victoria Carlson, Ryan Fleisher, Nikki Peters, and Brittany Vigil-Burbank from the Yurok Tribe at its monthly language workshop, held for the first time on the Berkeley campus. The morning focused on Yurok syntax and the afternoon featured a visit to the Bancroft Library to inspect early-twentieth-century Yurok manuscripts. (Photo by Zachary O'Hagan.)

November 29, 2025

Anderson awarded the Unicode Bulldog Award

Debbie Anderson was recognized by the Unicode Consortium for her two decades of contributions to the Unicode Standard and to the field of script digitization. The Unicode Bulldog Award is "to be given to those tenacious champions of Unicode who have produced solid achievements in promoting its use around the globe. This award is called the Bulldog Award; once they bite, they never let go!"

Presenters highlighted her supervision of more than 120 scripts into modern digital infrastructure, as well as her mentorship of the next generation of researchers and technologists. A well-deserved honor!

Unicode Consortium CEO Toral Cowieson recognizing Debbie Anderson with the Bulldog Award at the 2025 Unicode Technology Workshop

Unicode Consortium CEO Toral Cowieson recognizing Debbie Anderson with the Bulldog Award at the 2025 Unicode Technology Workshop. Photo credit: Elango Cheran

November 21, 2025

Linguistics events this week (Nov 21-28, 2025)

In and around the Department of Linguistics in the next week:

  • Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Friday Nov 21 - Dwinelle 5125 - 3-4pm
    Justin Davidson (UC Berkeley) leads a discussion of Montrul 2025
  • Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Nov 21 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3:10-4:30pm
    Practice LSA talks
    - Line Mikkelsen (UC Berkeley), Emily Clem (UC San Diego), Grethe Schmidt (Umiaq, Kalaallit Illuutaat), and Ellen Thrane (Umiaq, Kalaallit Illuutaat): "Reverse prolepsis in Kalaallisut"
    - Line Mikkelsen (UC Berkeley), Grethe Schmidt (Umiaq, Kalaallit Illuutaat), and Ellen Thrane (Umiaq, Kalaallit Illuutaat): "Focus fronting, Q-Particles and anti-pied-piping"

November 19, 2025

Scott publishes in Berkeley Papers in Formal Linguistics

Tessa Scott (PhD 2023) has just published the article "Formalizing two types of mixed A/Ā movement" in Berkeley Papers in Formal Linguistics.

November 16, 2025

Berkeley students present at HLS

Julian Vargo and Verónica Grajeda presented at the Hispanic Linguistics Symposium, hosted at the University of Arizona, Tucson, on November 13-15, 2025:

  • Julian Vargo: "Timing of Vocalic Articulatory Maxima in Spanish-English Bilinguals"
  • Julian Vargo & Tyler Thornley: "Asymmetrical Reinforcement of Nasalized Vowels in Spanish-English Bilinguals"
  • Verónica Grajeda: "U.S. Spanish Nasal Neutralization: A Case Study on the Production of /njV/ and /ɲV/"

November 14, 2025

Linguistics events this week (Nov 14-21, 2025)

In and around the Department of Linguistics in the next week:

November 13, 2025

Kane presents on archives at UNM

Aurora Martinez Kane participated as a speaker and moderator in a panel titled New Mexico Spanish Language Archival Recovery Project: Simposio y Plática at the University of New Mexico on Wednesday, November 12.

November 12, 2025

Beguš and Sprouse in The Economist, National Geographic, Daily Mail and others

Research by Gašper Beguš, Ronald Sprouse, and collaborators on whale vowels has been featured in The Economist, National Geographic, Daily Mail, Berkeley News, and other news outlets.

Beguš, Sprouse, and Leban in Open Mind

A paper titled "Vowel- and Diphthong-Like Spectral Patterns in Sperm Whale Codas" by Gašper Beguš, Ronald Sprouse, Andrej Leban (lab alum) and collaborators has been published in Open Mind.

November 10, 2025

McLaughlin and Huotari in Target

Mairi McLaughlin and former UC Berkeley postdoc and visiting scholar Léa Huotari published an article in Target called "A mixed-methods analysis of the translation of quotations in international news dispatches."