News

The 2024-2025 colloquium series continues on Monday, February 10, with a talk by Julia Swan (San José State University), taking place in Dwinelle 370 and on Zoom (passcode: lx-colloq) from 3:10-4:30pm. Her talk is entitled "Complementary Perspectives in Studies of Sound Change: A Case Study of Pre-/ɡ/ Merger." The abstract is as follows:

A pronunciation pattern affecting the vowels in FACE, DRESS and TRAP before the voiced velar /ɡ/ has been observed in many North American locales. In these communities, BEG and BAG are variably observed to raise and may merge with BAGEL, which is sometimes described as pre-velar raising or BAG-raising. The feature has been discussed as a diagnostic of variation within the Western U.S. dialect region. Drawing on sociophonetic analysis of young adults in the Pacific Northwest, I explore interspeaker variation and approximate a social meaning for the raised or merged variant. I complement this with a view from a collaborative perceptual study showing that, in communities where the BAG-BAGEL merger is attested in production, listeners also display less sensitivity to the phonemic distinction. Lastly, I provide a limited historical view of BAG-BEG-BAGEL merger to better pinpoint the timing of this development and explore possible explanations for its origins. Taken together, and corroborated by other scholarship, I argue that 1) despite these disparate locales and phonetically variable instantiations, there are unified articulatory and structural motivations for the pre-/ɡ/ phenomena affecting the front vowel system, 2) the phenomenon is best treated as a conditioned vowel merger rather than vowel raising, and 3) the diffusion of this feature among urban, West Coast, American talkers may be limited by its socioindexical meanings. This work underscores the importance of pursuing complementary approaches in the study of sound change that include variationist, community-level distinctions, an understanding of the interactional social meaning of the variants in local contexts, and studies of perception along with production.

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

• Linguistics Department Colloquium - Monday Feb 3 - Dwinelle 370 and Zoom (passcode: lx-colloq) - 3:10-4:30pm
  Carol Rose Little (University of Oklahoma): "The syntax of accompanying in Ch’ol (Mayan)"
• Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Monday Feb 3 - Dwinelle 5125 and Zoom - 2-3pm
  Discussion of our winter break accomplishments and setting research goals for the spring semester!
• Phorum - Friday Jan 31 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5pm
  Maksymilian Dąbkowski (UC Berkeley): "The unpredictable but expected deglottalization in some former A'ingae derivatives"
• Phorum - Friday Feb 7 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5pm
  Katie Russell (UC Berkeley): "Local nasalization in Atchan, a language without nasal consonants"

Congratulations to Isaac Bleaman, who will be giving an invited research talk titled "Holocaust Testimonies in Yiddish Language Research and Pedagogy" at the UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies on February 24. More info is available here.

Here's the latest from the California Language Archive:

• Did you miss our end-of-year newsletter? Read it here!
• We have made available digital copies of 11 cassette tape recordings made by musicologist Susana Weich-Shahak in Peru in 1974 and 1975, consisting of stories, songs, and conversations in Arakmbut (Harakmbut), Ashaninka (Arawakan), Máíjĩ̵̀kì (Tukanoan), and Yagua (Peba-Yaguan), from the communities of Shintuya, Cutivireni, Sucusari, and Catalán, respectively (listen to an excerpt of Luis Ríos's (Bábì) story of Maineno in Máíjĩ̵̀kì here). The larger collection, the Colección de Materiales de Lenguas Peruanas de Susana Weich-Shahak, was previously accessioned, and additionally includes 8mm film and photographic slides, all of which are also now digitized.
• Zachary Wellstood, together with Nellie and R. David Zorc, has accessioned Documenting Aklanon Morphosyntax. The collection consists of materials spanning a field methods course at the University of Maryland in 2018 and 2019, with Maria Polinsky and Omer Preminger (recordings and notes in bundles 001-021), and telephone-based research afterward. The documentation focuses on grammatical topics.

Here are some photos of Berkeley linguists from the 2025 Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (January 9-12 in Philadelphia)!

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

• Ladino/Judeo-Spanish Working Group - Thursday Jan 30 - Dwinelle 1303 - 4-5pm (note the new day, time, and room)
  Echar Lashon (Conversation Hour & Welcome Back! Snacks provided!)
• Language Revitalization Working Group - Wednesday Jan 29 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-4pm
  LR Library Launch & Semester Welcome Event! (Snacks provided. We'll share what LR projects we're all working on this semester. If you can, bring language revitalization books to donate to the library!)
• Phorum - Friday Jan 31 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5pm
  Maksymilian Dąbkowski (UC Berkeley): "The unpredictable but expected deglottalization in some former A'ingae derivatives"

Anushah Hossain (Script Encoding Initiative) gave a talk entitled "ISCII Imperialism: The Legacy of a Devanagari-Centric Character Code" on January 18 at Face/Interface, a conference on global type design at Stanford University.

She also gave an online talk on January 23 for World Endangered Writing Day titled "Script Encoding: The Future," which reviewed the Script Encoding Initiative's past work and new directions.

Congrats to the Berkeley linguists who will be presenting their work at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas, taking place online from January 24 to 26:

• Anna Björklund: "The structure of the Nomlaki verb"
• Maksymilian Dąbkowski: "Teasing the A'ingae discourse and conditional marking apart"