News

The 2025-2026 Linguistics Colloquium series continues on Monday, September 29, with a talk by Florian Lionnet (Princeton). The talk will take place in Dwinelle 370 and synchronously via Zoom (password: lx-colloq) from 3:10-4:30pm. The title is "Areal alignment and the phonological diversification of Bua languages (Chad)" and the abstract is as follows:

Bua languages (Niger-Congo) form a relatively compact group of 10 languages spoken by small communities in southern Chad. The group is split into two noticeably different branches: Riverine languages along the Middle Chari River, and Inland languages further east. Comparative data shows that proto-Bua had a vowel system characterized by an ATR contrast and ATR harmony, three contrastive plosive series (voiceless, voiced, implosive), and a two-tone system.

In this talk, I show how Riverine languages lost the ATR contrast, reinterpreted ATR harmony as height harmony, developed interior vowels, enriched the plosive system with a series of prenasalized consonants, and innovated a third tone. I also show that Inland languages, on the other hand, maintained the proto-Bua ATR contrast and harmony, but drastically simplified the three-way plosive contrast, to the point of having no laryngeal contrast at all in some languages.

I argue that the changes that took place in Riverine Bua languages are the result of areal alignment, that is, a historical alignment of their sound systems to the phonological profile found in the Middle Chari area where they are spoken, and more generally in the Central African linguistic area. This alignment was made possible by the language ecology in which these languages are spoken, an ecology characterized by egalitarian multilingualism. The characteristics of the Inland phonological systems, on the other hand, cannot be attributed to the influence of any areal signal.

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

• Annual Meeting on Phonology - Thursday-Saturday Sep 25-27 - Sutardja Dai Hall and Dwinelle Hall
• Ladino/Judeo-Spanish Working Group - Friday Sep 26 - Dwinelle 1229 and Zoom - 10:10-11am
  Hélène Jawhara Piñer: "Holiday Tables, Ladino Voices: Sephardic Traditions Across Generations"
• Phorum - Friday Sep 19 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4:10-5pm
  AMP Practice Talks by Maksymilian Dąbkowski & Kai Schenck
• Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Friday Sep 19 - Dwinelle 5125 - 3-4pm
  Riley VanMeter (UC Berkeley): "Perceptions of 'Extravagance': Quantifying Attitudes of Varying Stages of Grammaticalization"
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Sep 19 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3:10-4:30pm
  Aidan Katson (UC Santa Cruz): "Expanding the nominal in English ACC- and POSS-ing nominalizations"

A paper on whale vowels by Gašper Beguš, Ronald Sprouse, and collaborators was recently featured in a news feature in the journal Nature.

Naitian Zhou, David Bamman, and Isaac L. Bleaman have published an article titled "Culture is not trivia: Sociocultural theory for cultural NLP" in Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Read it here!

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

• Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday Sep 17 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4pm
  Becky Jarvis, Andrew Liu, and Katie Russell: "Developing community-facing story corpus web resources"
• Phorum - Friday Sep 12 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4:10-5pm
  Anna Björklund (UC Berkeley): "Highlights in Nomlaki phonetics"
• Phorum - Friday Sep 19 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4:10-5pm
  AMP Practice Talks
• Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Friday Sep 12 - Dwinelle 5125 - 3-4pm
  Welcome, part II! Introductions, research updates, scheduling and resource-sharing
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Sep 12 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Eli Sharf and Emily Knick (UC Santa Cruz): "On focus and the perfect aspect"
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Sep 19 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Aidan Katson (UC Santa Cruz): TBA

Congratulations to Allegra Robertson Molinaro (PhD 2025), who will start her new job on September 22 as a Computational Linguist & Data Annotation Lead at Wispr, a voice dictation company based in San Francisco. There she will be working on speech recognition and style personalization to help adapt the tool to diverse speakers and contexts.

Congratulations to Amber Galvano, who has just accepted a full-time position as a Linguistic Engineer at Meta after having spent the summer working as a Linguistic Engineering Intern, and will finish her dissertation remotely from the Seattle area.

Dear colleagues, friends, and family,

You are warmly invited to join us in celebrating Robin Tolmach Lakoff's life and her immense impact on Linguistics and beyond. The UC Berkeley Department of Linguistics will be hosting a memorial service at the Alumni House, UC Berkeley, on Sunday, November 2, 2025, from 1-4 p.m. PST. This gathering will provide an opportunity to honor Robin's memory, share stories, and connect with one another.

To assist us with event planning, please contact Susan Luong for the RSVP form, which includes an option to share a reflection or memory of Robin that may be incorporated into the tribute.

We hope you can join us as we remember and celebrate a truly remarkable individual.

With sincere regards,
Prof. Peter Jenks, Chair
Department of Linguistics, UC Berkeley

(Image: Robin Lakoff during RobinFest in May 2012, courtesy of Sharon Inkelas)

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

• Linguistics Department Colloquium - Monday Sep 8 - Dwinelle 370 and Zoom (passcode: lx-colloq) - 3:10-4:30pm
  Jody Kreiman (UCLA): "What do listeners know about voices?"
• Ladino/Judeo-Spanish Working Group - Tuesday Sep 9 - Dwinelle 1229 - 3:40-4:30pm
  Beginner-friendly conversation hour (introducing ourselves and our families), SNACKS!
• Language Revitalization Working Group - Wednesday Sep 10 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3:10-4pm
  Fall Welcome - Join us for snacks, socializing, and taking turns sharing about the LR work we're involved with. It'll also be an opportunity to ask for and give advice about projects. No need to prepare anything - come as you are!
• Phorum - Friday Sep 5 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4:10-5pm
  Zachary O'Hagan (UC Berkeley): "Phonologically Conditioned Allomorphy in Chamikuro"
• Phorum - Friday Sep 12 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4:10-5pm
  Anna Björklund (UC Berkeley): Dissertation exit talk
• Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Friday Sep 5 - Dwinelle 5125 - 3-4pm
  Welcome! Introductions, research updates and goal setting
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Sep 5 - 3-4:30pm
  Round robin! Join us again at Amy Rose's house.

Larry Hyman has published a chapter entitled "Tone" (pp. 56-64) in The Oxford Guide to the Bantu Languages, edited by Lutz Marten, Ellen Hurst-Harosh, Nancy C. Kula, and Jochen Zeller (Oxford University Press, 2025).

Berkeley linguists have been very busy this summer! We're happy to share the stories that they submitted to Calques about their summer adventures:

• Keith Johnson led a workshop on "Python tools for Phonetics" at the LSA summer institute and relatedly was awarded a two-year NSF grant for "Next steps in acoustic phonetics research."
• Anna Björklund filed her dissertation, "A Grammar of Nomlaki," and will give an exit talk on highlights of the dissertation in Phorum at 4pm on September 12.
• In May, Keith Johnson and Alexandra Pfiffner presented their collaborative work at the Acoustical Society of America. Their first project presented some preliminary results of acoustic and visual properties of vowels in Oakland, based on their "Voices of Oakland" corpus. The second project demonstrated a computational implementation of the "Cue-based Features" approach to the phonetics/phonology interface.
• In June, Alexandra Pfiffner and co-author Nicole Rosen (U Manitoba) presented their work on "Phonetic correlates of a Canadian Prairies orientation" at the annual conference of the Canadian Linguistic Association. Later that month, they gave a keynote address at the 14th annual Change and Variation in Canada workshop. The keynote was titled "Social meaning in Manitoba: Expressing hardiness, self-reliance, and survival through consonant variation."
• Larry Hyman spent a month in Paris and Lyon in late May-June, the excuse being the annual business meeting of the France-Berkeley Fund, which he has been directing for 15 years. This included visits to two extraordinary laboratoires: Neurospin, a research center in brain imaging in Saclay, just outside Paris, and the Laboratoire Archéologique Moléculaire et Structurale at the Sorbonne. He spent the rest of the summer working on Limba, an understudied isolate in the Niger-Congo family spoken in Sierra Leone, and enjoying family, especially three grandchildren, the last of whom was born on April 30, which would have been his mother's 100th birthday!

• Gašper Beguš was elevated to the rank of Senior Member at IEEE.
       He gave talks or taught classes at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, LSA Summer Institute in Oregon (co-taught with Stephan Meylan), participated in the Schloss Dagstuhl Institute, was an invited panelist at the SIGMORPHON workshop, and gave a plenary at ICHL in Santiago de Chile. Gašper also gave two invited virtual talks, at the Interspecies Internet and an Acoustical Society of America Webinar.
       Gašper’s models and AI interpretability techniques inspired parts of a sci-fi book for young audiences, the UFO Files by Kathryn Hulick.
       Gašper’s work was featured in NatGeo, the New Scientist, DIE ZEIT, IEEE Spectrum, ITNOW, Fiat Lux Magazine, Animalogic, and Slovenian newspaper of record Delo.

• In May-June 2025, Hannah Sande and PhD students Katherine Russell and Rebecca Jarvis (now officially an alum!) traveled to Côte d'Ivoire to carry out language documentation work, along with their Ivorian collaborators, on four Ivorian languages: Guébie, Atchan, Nghlwa, and Aizi. This work was funded by Oswalt Endangered Language grants and Sande's NSF-CAREER grant (#2236768).
  
  

  Katherine Russell and Hannah Sande working with Guébie speaker Badiba Olivier Agodio

  
  

  Katherine Russell and Rebecca Jarvis with Atchan speaker and collaborator Dr. Maxime Dido

• Rhosean Asmah, Niko Schwarz, and Nicole Holliday spent a portion of the summer conducting research for their ICBS-funded grant, "I'ma throw an R in any word that got a U in it: Memphis Rhotacization"
  
  
• Zachary O'Hagan spent six weeks in Peru this summer documenting Chamikuro (Arawakan) with Alfonso Patow, Corina Orbe, and Antonio Inuma. There he also visited the Museo Nacional de la Cultura Peruana, guided by Ashaninka leader Najashi Samaniego to view an exhibition of Ashaninka cultural objects he repatriated from the home of anthropologist Gerald Weiss. In August, Zach gave a keynote presentation on information structure at AMAZONICAS X in Belém, Brazil, where he also presented research on extraction in Chamikuro.
• The Script Encoding Initiative (SEI) has had a very active summer! Helena Kansa started as Program Manager in late April. She and Anushah Hossain are now based in Dwinelle 1224 - please drop by and say hello!

• In July, Debbie Anderson and Anushah Hossain served as U.S. national body representatives in the annual ISO/IEC 10646 Universal Coded Character Set meeting held in Niigata, Japan.
  

• Anushah Hossain participated in a research exchange later that month in the Non-Latin Type Research program at the University of Reading and with the Visual Interactions in Early Writing Systems (VIEWS) Project at the University of Cambridge.
• SEI launched a new website and blog this summer, found at sei.berkeley.edu. The site hosts an interactive map on scripts awaiting digital support, as well as research updates and syllabi related to writing, technology, and society. You can follow along with SEI's work there or via their freshly launched newsletter and Instagram.

• Maksymilian Dąbkowski gave a seminar talk on "The architecture of phonology and its interfaces: Insights from A’ingae" at the University of Hong Kong, Pok Fu Lam.

• Gašper Beguš, Maksymilian Dąbkowski, and Ryan Rhodes published the article "Large linguistic models: Investigating LLMs' metalinguistic abilities" in IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 1–15. The research reported in the paper has been covered by various news outlets:

  • Chatbots demonstrate language mastery. Grant Powell at ITNOW 67(3), pp. 34–35.
  • Wie besonders ist der Mensch? [How special is the human being?] Christoph Drösser at Die Zeit 36, p. 30.
  • Chatbots get language on a surprisingly deep level. Michelle Hampson at IEEE Spectrum 8, p. 9.
  • As chatbots get smarter, humans’ unique language abilities are becoming less special. Jason Pohl at UC Berkeley News.
  • Chatbots don’t just do language, they do metalinguistics. Michelle Hampson at IEEE Spectrum.
• Jhonni Carr spent two glorious months in Mexico this summer completing data analysis and finishing an article on UC Berkeley's linguistic landscape and language policies in relation to its goal of becoming an HSI by 2027. At the end of last semester she was honored to be selected for the Arts & Humanities Teaching Award.
• Hannah Sande, Nafisa Rashid, and Becky Everson presented at ACAL in Minneapolis in May 2025