News

January 21, 2025

Whitmore speaks at MLA

Oliver Whitmore (French) presented a talk at the 2025 Modern Language Association (MLA) Convention, held in New Orleans from January 9-12, titled "Disputing Diglossia: When a sociolinguist doesn't see language."

January 20, 2025

Sande publishes on deletion and epenthesis in Kru languages

Congratulations to Hannah Sande, who published a chapter, "Insertion or deletion? CVCV/CCV alternations in Kru languages," in a new volume Epenthesis and beyond: Recent approaches to insertion in phonology and its interfaces with Language Science Press, available here: https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/469.

Berkeley linguists attend workshop of Yurok Language Program

Andrew Garrett, Madeleine Strait, Rhosean Asmah, and Julia Peck attended the January workshop of the Yurok Language Program in Klamath on the Yurok Reservation, where Andrew led a session on numerals and the Yurok lunar calendar system. Andrew was recognized with a gift and gratitude for his longtime engagement and prioritization of community requests and needs! They also visited Rek'woy, the place where the Klamath River, now undammed thanks in part to Yurok and Karuk activism, flows freely into the Pacific Ocean (pictured).

'Echkwoh Rek'woy 'o tenem'.
There are a lot of sea lions at Rek'woy.

January 19, 2025

Mam course offered at UC Berkeley

The Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies just launched a free (non-credit) Mam class for the spring semester. See here for more information.

December 18, 2024

Podcast interview on Garrett book

Greg LeBlanc's podcast unSILOed features a new interview with Andrew Garrett on "The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall — Revisiting the Past and Renaming the Present" (including both audio and video versions).

December 12, 2024

Beguš in Canadian Geographic
Research by Gašper Beguš has recently been featured in Canadian Geographic's Out of our depth: speaking with whales. Link to the story:
Dąbkowski publishes LI squib on postlabial rounding

Maksymilian Dąbkowski published a squib on "A Q-Theoretic Solution to A’ingae Postlabial Rounding" in Linguistic Inquiry. The paper can be found here: https://doi.org/10.1162/ling_a_00550. Congrats, Maks!

New review of Garrett book

A review by Chloé Laplantine of Andrew Garrett's book The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall: Language, Memory, and Indigenous California has appeared in the journal Histoire Épistémologie Langage 46/2 (2024): 

Linguistics events this week (Dec. 13-Dec. 20)
In and around the Linguistics Department in the next week:

Plus an event during break:

  • LSA practice talks – Thurdsay, January 2 - 11am-1pm and Friday, January 3 - 11am-1pm - Dwinelle 1303 and on Zoom

December 5, 2024

Linguistics events this week (December 6-13)
In and around the Linguistics Department in the next week:
  • SSCircle – Friday, December 6 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-4:30pmRebecca Jarvis (UC Berkeley): TBA
  • SLaB – Friday, December 6 - Spanish & Portuguese Library (Dwinelle 5125) - 3-4pm
    Research updates and plans
Beguš and Sprouse (et al.) at Wired Big Interview Science Fair
Work by Gašper Beguš and Ronald Sprouse and coauthors has been highlighted at the Science Fair at the WIRED's Big Interview on December 3, 2024. More info about the event: https://events.wired.com/big-interview/home. The preprint is available at https://osf.io/preprints/osf/285cs. Congrats!
Vowels in Sperm Whales presentation materials
Michael receives Fulbright-Hayes Faculty Research Abroad Fellowship

Lev Michael will be on research leave during Spring and Fall 2025 to carry out research supported by a Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Abroad Fellowship. Lev is planning to work with speakers of four Arawakan languages, Asháninka, Ashéninka, Nomatsigenga, and Yanesha', on a variety of topics aimed at clarifying the historical and language contact relationships among Peruvian Arawakan languages and their non-Arawakan neighbors. Congrats, Lev!

November 29, 2024

Linguistics events this week (November 29-December 6)
In and around the Linguistics Department in the next week:
  • Linguistics Department Colloquium – Monday, December 2 - Dwinelle 370 and on Zoom (lx-colloq) - 3-5pm
    Gabriella Licata (UC Riverside), Brian Asey Gonsoulin, Mesro Coles, Rob Tyler, and Habib Watkins (Mount Tamalpais College): "The Sociolinguistic Labor of Incarcerated People"
  • Canadian Studies Program – Tuesday, December 3 - 223 Philosophy Hall and Zoom (RSVP here) - 12:30-2 p.m.
    Summer Sands-Macbeth (Queen’s University, Ontario): Efforts at Indigenous Language Revitalization at Bkejwanong
  • SSCircle – Friday, December 6 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-4:30pm
    Rebecca Jarvis (UC Berkeley): TBA
  • BLC Fellow Forum – Friday, December 6 - Dwinelle B-4 & Zoom - 3-5pm

    Jennifer Kaplan (UC Berkeley): "Gender in/and French: Teaching Inclusive French in the First-Year Language Classroom and Beyond"


Beguš in The Harvard Crimson
Research by Gašper Beguš has recently been featured in The Harvard Crimson's article titled Are Whales Trying to Tell Us Something? https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2024/10/26/project-ceti-translating-whales-scrutiny/

November 26, 2024

Berkeley linguists at the LSA

Berkeley linguists are giving 18 presentations, as well as moderating and hosting several sessions, at the LSA and its sister societies, January 9-12, 2025. Congrats, all!

  • Gašper Beguš: 5-minute linguist talk: "Artificial Language Learners"
  • Nicole Holliday, moderator for a session on "Variation and change"

  • Julianne Kapner, session organizer for "Using oral histories for sociolinguistic research"

  • Gašper Beguš, presenter in a 2-day tutorial on "Deep Language Learning: Modeling language from raw speech", with Bruno Ferenc Segedin, Alan Zhou, Sneha Ray Barman, Jingyi Chen

  • Sarah Ertel: "Prevelar raising in eastern Washington English"

  • Nafisa Rashid: "Krio Heritage Speakers and Their Use of Prepositions and Verb Serialization"

  • Nicole Holliday and Sabriya Fisher (Wellesley): "AAE morphosyntactic and prosodic feature use among students: Effects on sociolinguistic awareness and school discipline"

  • Julian Vargo: "Evidence for the Effect of Visual Input on L2-Learner Vowel Production"
  • Anna Knall: "Gender Assignment Strategies in Mixed Noun Phrases: Evidence from Spanish-English Bilinguals in California"

  • Maksymilian Dąbkowski: "Deglottalizing contamination in A'ingae historical derivatives"

  • Alexandra Pfiffner, Lindsay Hatch, & Katherine R. Russell: "Acoustics and Aerodynamics of Nghlwa Implosives"

  • Amber Galvano, Sansan Claude Hien, and Hannah Sande: "Phonetic and phonological patterning of glottalized sonorants in Lobi"

  • Madeleine Oakley (CSU San Marcos) and Hannah Sande: "The acoustic properties of implosives in Guébie (Kru)"

  • Amber Galvano: "The role of sexuality in an intersectional approach to vowel space variation"

  • Isaac Bleaman & Chaya Nove (Brown) – "Sources of linguistic variation in testimony interviews with Holocaust survivors"

  • Julianne Kapner & Maya Ravindranath Abtahian (U. of Rochester): "Oral histories for community-engaged sociolinguistics: insights from the 19th Ward"

  • Julianne Kapner: "The Armenian Language in the Bay Area Project: oral history for diaspora sociolinguistics"
  • Kai Schenck: poster on An Emergent analysis of Yurok initial h"
  • Maksymilian Dąbkowski and Gašper Beguš: poster on "Large language models and linguistic recursion"
  • Gašper Beguš: poster on "CiwaGAN: Informative imitation with articulatory learning"
Berkeley linguists publish in WCCFL 39 proceedings

The proceedings of WCCFL 39 were just published (the conference was originally held in Spring 2021), including papers by four current and recent Berkeley PhD students:

Workshop on Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Languages, Cultures, and History of Contemporary Amazonia

A workshop on Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Languages, Cultures, and History of Contemporary Amazonia will be held at Berkeley on December 13, in 1229 Dwinelle Hall, with several talks by current and former Berkeley linguists:

    • 10:00AM Emanuele Fabiano (Coimbra), Joshua Homan (Kansas) & Zachary O'Hagan (Berkeley), "New Perspectives on Omurano (isolate; Peru) Based on Archival Records and Oral Histories"
    • 10:45AM Zachary O'Hagan (Berkeley), "A Close Reading of Elicitation with a 99-year-old Speaker of Chamikuro (Arawakan; Peru)"
    • 11:30AM Stephanie Farmer, "Reflections on the Documentation of Muniche (isolate; Peru) Fifteen Years Later"
    • 1:30PM Lev Michael (Berkeley), "Linguistic Phylogeny and the Arawakan Settlement of the Greater Ucayali Basin"
    • 2:15PM Karen Shiratori (Coimbra), "The Song of Atxu: The Right to Memory and the Recovery of the Language of a Hi-Merimã Survivor"
    • 3:00PM Pirjo Kristiina Virtanen (Helsinki), "Apurinã Language Vitality and Deforestation on the Purús River"
    • 3:45PM Laura R. Graham (Iowa), "A’uwẽ (Xavante) Mrémé in the Brazilian Linguistic Landscape"
CLA Updates

Here's the latest from the California Language Archive:

  • Bernat Bardagil (postdoc 2018-2020) has accessioned a new collection of recordings of stories, songs, and other cultural events, notes, and photographs related to the documentation of Mẽbêngôkre (Jê; Brazil) in 2015 in the Xikrín community of Djudjêkô (pictured below, from catalog item 2024-32.014), part of the Xikrín do Cateté Indigenous Territory. Mẽbêngôkre is also spoken by the Kayapó people.

Part of the Xikrín do Cateté Indigenous Territory

November 21, 2024

Linguistics events this week (November 22-December 2)
In and around the Linguistics Department in the next week:
  • Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley (SLaB) – Friday, November 22 - Spanish & Portuguese Library (Dwinelle 5125) - 3-4pm
    Research updates
  • SSCircle – Friday, November 22 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-4:30pm
    Abby Roberts (UC Berkeley): Characterizing Nukuoro Copulas: Analysis and Implications
  • Phorum – Friday, November 22 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5pm
    Suyuan Liu (University of British Columbia): TBA
  • Ladino/Judeo-Spanish Working Group – Monday, Nov. 25 - Dwinelle 1229 - 3-4pm
    Ora de echar lashon (beginner-friendly conversation hour) on what we are grateful for and Ladino folk music. Delicious snacks provided as always!
  • Linguistics Department Colloquium – Monday, December 2 - Dwinelle 370 and on zoom (lx-colloq) - 3-5pm
    Gabriella Licata (UC Riverside), Brian Asey Gonsoulin, Mesro Coles, Rob Tyler, and Habib Watkins (Mount Tamalpais College): "The Sociolinguistic Labor of Incarcerated People"
CLA Updates

Here's the latest from the California Language Archive:

  • This week we host the fourth visit supported by the new CLA Community Research Grant: Kawaiisu community members and collaborating linguists (left to right) Merlene Everson, Laura Grant, Sophia Kendrick, and Brandi Kendrick. They are consulting on the cataloging of the forthcoming Maurice L. Zigmond Collection of Uto-Aztecan Language Materials acquired in April of last year. The CLA has previously collaborated with Grant, Everson, and others to archive the born-digital collection Kawaiisu Conversations and Landscapes Project, which features the voices of Everson's mother, the late Betty Girado Hernandez, her aunt, and uncle.

Kawaiisu CLA visit