News

Congratulations to Isaac L. Bleaman and co-author Georg F.K. Höhn on the publication of their article "Preposition-determiner interactions in a Northeastern Yiddish corpus" in the Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics!

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

• Ladino/Judeo-Spanish Working Group - Tuesday Oct 27 - Dwinelle 1229 and Zoom - 11am-12pm
  Kent Fredholm (Karlstad University): "Ladino Learners' Views on Learning Ladino: Challenges and Needs in Revitalizing a Threatened Language"
• Phorum - Monday Oct 26 - Dwinelle 1229 and Zoom - 12:10-1pm
  Talk by Julian Vargo (UC Berkeley)
• Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Friday Oct 23 - Dwinelle 5125 and Zoom - 2-3pm
  Discussion of Eckert 2008 led by Ivy Shaw
• Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Friday Oct 30 - Dwinelle 5125 and Zoom - 2-3pm
  Workshop on "Corpus phonetics, forced alignment, and data processing in understudied languages" led by Shulin Liu
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Oct 23 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3:10-4:30pm
  Andrew Garrett and Erik Hans Maier (UC Berkeley): "Verbal aspect and narrative structure in Karuk"
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Oct 30 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3:10-4:30pm
  Talk by Chase Boles (UC Berkeley)

On Friday, October 30, Isaac Bleaman will be giving an invited talk about the Corpus of Spoken Yiddish in Europe at Michigan State University (via Zoom, at 12pm Pacific). Registration details can be found here.

On October 10, Julian Vargo and Henry Sales Hernandez led a workshop for a new cohort of Mam students at the Unión Maya in Oakland, teaching how to type using the Mam keyboard.

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

• Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday Oct 21 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4pm
  Darya Kavitskaya (UC Berkeley): "To Be Named: Anonymity and Recognition in Linguistics Fieldwork"
• Phorum - Monday Oct 19 - Dwinelle 1229 and Zoom - 12:10-1pm
  Talk by Ilina Bhaya-Grossman
• Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Friday Oct 16 - Dwinelle 5125 and Zoom - 2-3pm
  Becky Everson (UC Berkeley): "Morphological adaptation of loanwords in Tjhauba: Interspeaker variation in diminutive derivational morphology"
• Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Friday Oct 23 - Dwinelle 5125 and Zoom - 2-3pm
  Paper discussion led by Ivy Shaw
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Oct 23 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3:10-4:30pm
  Andrew Garrett and Erik Hans Maier (UC Berkeley): "Verbal aspect and narrative structure in Karuk"

The Script Encoding Initiative is heading to France! Debbie Anderson, Helena Kansa, Katie Russell, and Anushah Hossain will be in Nancy for the Unicode Technology Workshop (UTW), October 20–23, followed by the co-located Unicode Technical Committee standards meeting, October 26–28. UTW is an annual event about text technologies in society. SEI acted as a core organizer for this year's edition, encouraging more interdisciplinary and international perspectives. Kansa will deliver a talk on accessibility technologies, and the full team will give presentations on SEI's work and the Missing Scripts project. Learn more on the UTW 2026 website.

Here's the latest from the California Language Archive:

• CLA GSR Tzintia Montaño has written the first in a forthcoming series of blog posts about our Mixtec language holdings!
• In collaboration with Ángel Bittancourt Serra and Quelina Witancourt Guerrero, Amalia Skilton (PhD 2019) has accessioned transcriptions of 35 hours of caregiver-child interactions and other conversations in Ticuna (isolate; Peru). The transcriptions can be found in their own items with relations to items containing corresponding audiovisual files, with detailed descriptions of the contents of the files and their relationships among each other (see especially items 2018-19.085 thru 2018-19.123, 2018-19.158 thru 2018-19.191, and 2018-19.213 thru 2018-19.223). Items 2018-19.038 and 2018-19.134 contain guides to the orthography and transcription practices, respectively.
• We've accessioned the Roderick Jacobs Collection of Cupeño Language Materials (Uto-Aztecan; CA), combining original field notes and other miscellaneous papers donated by Jacobs's wife in 2021 with two items previously held by the CLA. Jacobs (1934-2018) worked from the late 1960s with Cupeño elder Roscinda Nolasquez (1892-1987), receiving a PhD in Linguistics at UC San Diego in 1972 with a dissertation titled "Syntactic Change: A Cupan (Uto-Aztecan) Case Study." Mrs. Nolasquez co-authored multiple books including "Mulu'wetam: The First People," with anthropologist Jane Hill in 1973.
• We've accessioned a small collection of materials from the 1990-1991 Berkeley graduate field methods course on Chalcatongo de Hidalgo Mixtec (Otomanguean; Mexico). The language consultant was Luciano Cortés Nicolás and the instructor was Leanne Hinton.
• Line Mikkelsen, Hannah Sande, and Julianne Kapner have added new materials to their and their collaborators' collections on Kalaallisut (2022-13.248 thru 2022-13.263 here), Guébie (2014-15.258 thru 2014-15.294 here), and Armenian (2024-13.061 thru 2024-13.071 here).
• University of New Mexico PhD candidate Ivette González Castillo, María Eloísa González Castro, and their collaborators have accessioned the first portion of a new collection of materials on Pa Ipai (Yuman; Mexico). The collection consists of audiovisual recordings of conversations, procedural activities, and staged communicative events, including interactions prompted by a board game and scripted performances written and enacted by Pa Ipai speakers.

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

• Ladino/Judeo-Spanish Working Group - Tuesday Oct 13 - Dwinelle 1229 and Zoom - 11am-12pm
  Aurora Martinez Kane (UC Berkeley): "Traditional New Mexican Spanish and Crossovers with Ladino"
• Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Friday Oct 9 - Dwinelle 5125 and Zoom - 2-3pm
  Sarah Lease (UC Berkeley): "Beyond the antepenultimate: Item-specific information gradually comes online after other-language activation"
• Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Friday Oct 16 - Dwinelle 5125 and Zoom - 2-3pm
  Becky Everson (UC Berkeley): "Morphological adaptation of loanwords in Tjhauba: Interspeaker variation in diminutive derivational morphology"
• Syntax and Semantics Circle
  The NELS practice session on October 9 has been canceled.

On Monday, October 5, Isaac Bleaman visited Stanford to give a guest lecture on new-speaker parenthood for Linguistics 240: Language Acquisition, taught by Meg Cychosz (Berkeley PhD 2020).

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

• Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday Oct 7 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4pm
  Computational methods showcase! Join us for a short presentation by Becky Everson and Terry Regier followed by an open showcase for anyone who'd like to share how they've used computational methods to support their documentation/descriptive work.
• Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Friday Oct 2 - Dwinelle 5125 and Zoom - 2-3pm
  Workshop: Graphing in R for Linguistics Research. (Please come ready with R and R Studio installed!)
• Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Friday Oct 9 - Dwinelle 5125 and Zoom - 2-3pm
  Research talk by Sarah Lease (UC Berkeley)
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Oct 2 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3:10-4:30pm
  Zachary O'Hagan (UC Berkeley): "Aspectual Iconicity, Polysemy, and Idiomaticity of Caquinte Ideophones"
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Oct 9 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3:10-4:30pm
  NELS practice session

Several current and former Berkeley linguists are presenting at the Annual Meeting on Phonology, October 9-11 at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Talks:

• A synchronic scalar vowel shift in Lobi (Gur/Mabia) plural formation (Prof. Hannah Sande and Berkeley undergraduate student Dylan Worden)

Posters:

• Modeling segment strength in Q Theory: A case study of Ticuna (Myriam Lapierre (PhD 2021), Karee Garvin (PhD 2021))
• Prosodically-conditioned contour/register alternations in Northern Toussian (Anthony Struthers-Young, Nicholas Rolle (PhD 2018))
• Integrating nominals into a metrical analysis of Kuria tone (Berkeley PhD student Kai Schenck)
• Domain-Specific Phonology of Shekgalagari Diminutives (Berkeley PhD student Rebecca Everson)
• From Denasalization to Backcopying in Nyandarua Gĩkũyũ: Contrast Loss and the Emergence of Base-Reduplicant Identity (Chelsea (Yuen Chun) Tang (BA 2022))

A new volume honoring the life, memory, and academic legacy of the late Professor Gary B. Holland has just been published. The volume, titled Gary Holland mneías khárin, is edited by Roslyn Burns, Alfredo Rizza, and Marina Zorman, and it has been published by Reichert Verlag and Ljubljana University Press. Further details can be found here.

The volume includes contributions by several Berkeley faculty, including Eve Sweetser and Johanna Nichols, and two contributions by Gary's last student, Roslyn Burns.

An article from September 29 in the Los Angeles Times titled "Let each culture decide which languages to save, and how" mentioned Ladino en Kaza, the home language nesting project developed by UC Berkeley students for Ladino/Judeo-Spanish, as an example of active language reclamation work. Ladino en Kaza was created by Julia Peck and made possible by the assistance of many Berkeley undergraduate alumni (Julian Vargo, Adrienne Fleming, Karleigh Dehlsen, Zag Hervas, Parth Patel, and Ece Tabag) through the LRAP program.

Congratulations to Justin Davidson and Julian Vargo on a new publication:

Amengual, M., Davidson, J., Kim, J. Y., & Vargo, J. (2026). Multilingual Hispanic Speech in California (MuHSiC): A Large-Scale Open-Access Spanish–English Bilingual Corpus. International Journal of Bilingualism. https://doi.org/10.1177/13670069261489060

Six Glottal Non-Stops ran the Lake Merritt 4th Sunday Run on September 27. Elias, Sydney, Hannah, and Andrew placed first in their age groups.

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

• Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Friday Sep 25 - Dwinelle 5125 and Zoom - 2-3pm.
  Data Presentation by Verónica Grajeda
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Sept 25 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3:10-4:30pm
  Rebecca Jarvis (Potsdam): An initial look at Atchan impersonal pronouns and reduced purpose clauses
• Phorum - Monday Sept 28 - Dwinelle 1229 and Zoom - 12(:10) pm - 1:00 pm 
  AMP 2026 Practice Presentations
• Ladino/Judeo-Spanish Working Group - Tuesday Sep 29 - Dwinelle 1229 and Zoom - 11:00am-12pm
  Workshop on Ladino songs/Atolye de kantikas en ladino
• Language Revitalization Working Group - Wednesday Sept 30 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3:10-4pm
  Welcome gathering / Round robin. All students, faculty, staff, and community members doing Language Revitalization, Language Activism or interested in this work are welcome. No academic affiliation needed!
• Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Friday Oct 2 - Dwinelle 5125 and Zoom - 2-3pm.
  Workshop: Graphing in R for Linguistics Research. (Please come ready with R and R Studio installed!)
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Oct 2 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3:10-4:30pm
  Zachary O'Hagan (Berkeley): TBA