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September 19, 2025

Linguistics events this week (Sep 19-26, 2025)

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

September 18, 2025

Beguš and Sprouse in Nature news

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

September 16, 2025

Zhou, Bamman, and Bleaman article on cultural NLP

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!

September 15, 2025

Garrett on Inuktun (Polar Inuit)

Andrew Garrett's paper "Alfred Kroeber’s Documentation of Inuktun (Polar Inuit)" has appeared in Anthropological Linguistics 64 ("2022" [actually 2025]), pp. 263–298 (open-access here).

AMP 2025 at UC Berkeley

The Annual Meeting on Phonology
September 25-27
Sutardja Dai Hall (Sep. 25-26) and Dwinelle Hall (Sep. 27)

The Annual Meeting on Phonology (AMP), founded in 2013, is held every Fall and showcases high-quality research in all areas of phonology. AMP 2025 will be held at UC Berkeley, and it will feature four invited talks (three in the main session and one in the special session) as well as other poster and talk sessions, all focused on aspects of phonology.

The main session of AMP 2025 will be held September 25-26, 2025, in Sutardja Dai Hall. This will be followed by a special session on "Deep Phonology: Doing phonology with deep learning" on September 27 in Dwinelle Hall.

The AMP program can be found here, more information can be found on the website here. To register, please follow this link. Berkeley students can volunteer to help out with AMP organizational duties in exchange for free registration (check the "Yes, I volunteer!" box in the registration link). We hope to see you there!

September 12, 2025

Linguistics events this week (Sep 12-19, 2025)

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

September 11, 2025

Beguš in American Bar Association Journal

Gašper Beguš's work on AI, law, and animal rights has recently been featured in the ABA Journal, the official publication of the American Bar Association.

CLA updates

Here's the latest from the California Language Archive:

  • Emily Drummond (PhD 2023) and Margaret Asperheim have accessioned more than 140 items into the collection Nukuoro Field Materials (see items 2019-24.188 forward). Dating from 2022, 2023, and 2024, the materials in these items include, among other things, recordings of stories, interviews, and elicitation sessions created both on Zoom and again in person in Micronesia.

September 10, 2025

Robertson Molinaro starts a job a Wispr

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.

September 9, 2025

Galvano accepts job at Meta

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.

September 8, 2025

Remembering Robin Lakoff: A Memorial at UC Berkeley

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)

September 5, 2025

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

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.

September 4, 2025

Hyman and Kamara appear in Berkeley Papers in Formal Linguistics

Larry Hyman and Daniel Kamara have just published "Latent high tones in Limba (Thɔnkɔ dialect), Sierra Leone" in Berkeley Papers in Formal Linguistics, vol. 4, issue 1.

NSF award to SEI to study newly-invented writing systems

The Script Encoding Initiative has been awarded a two-year research grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation, under the Science and Technology Studies program. This project will investigate modern "neographies" — newly invented scripts — and the challenges they pose for the technical standards-makers: when, and on what grounds, does a script earn a place in the world's digital infrastructure?

SEI will soon be recruiting a postdoctoral fellow to join the project. Stay tuned for the job announcement!

Announcing the 2025-2026 SEI Research Fellows

The Script Encoding Initiative's Research Fellows program provides mentorship and funding for early-career scholars from anywhere in the world to pursue innovative research on scripts and their digitization. Thanks to the generous support we received during this spring's Big Give campaign, we are delighted to announce an expanded cohort of three Research Fellows for 2025–26!

This year's fellows are Febri Muhammad Nasrullah (working on indigenous Indonesian scripts), Julie Sayo (working on the Kulitan script from the Philippines), and Jordan Williams (documenting ancient Nsibidi writing from Nigeria and Cameroon). Read the announcement on the SEI blog to learn more about their work. 

September 3, 2025

Hyman chapter on Bantu tone

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).

September 1, 2025

Kreiman Colloquium

The 2025-2026 Linguistics Colloquium series begins on Monday, September 8, with a talk by Jody Kreiman (UCLA). The talk will take place in Dwinelle 370 and synchronously via Zoom (password: lx-colloq) from 3:10-4:30pm. The title is "What do listeners know about voices?" and the abstract is as follows:

Voice is foundational in human (and mammalian) social behavior, conveying spoken messages and impressions of physical or social attributes, distinguishing one phoneme from another, encoding group membership and/or personal identity, expressing nuances of attitude and emotion, and so on, all seemingly by means of a relatively small number of psychoacoustic parameters. Understanding how all this happens requires knowledge of how voices differ from one another, and how they differ within speakers across utterances, in their acoustic structure. Where is the information that separates one speaker or one quality from another? As listeners we know a great deal about this, based on our life-long experience listening to voices; but as scientists we know relatively little. In this talk I will present ongoing studies of the structure of a psychoacoustic space for voices, and discuss how the observed structure may help us navigate the complex vocal auditory scene that surrounds us.

CLA updates

Here are some summer updates from the California Language Archive:

  • For the fall 2025 semester the CLA welcomes Tyler Lee-Wynant (GSR), Nyssa Combs and Sophia Hsu (undergraduate student assistants), and Priyanka Samant and Michaela Richter (BA Haverford 2025; volunteers)!
  • In July, 23 boxes of archival materials related primarily to Pomoan languages (California), all from the estate of Sally McLendon (1933-2024; PhD 1966), reached the CLA from New York City (see photograph).
  • Thanks to the cataloging work of Madison Fanucchi (BA 2025), we accessioned the Mauricio J. Mixco Papers and Sound Recordings (PhD 1971), a large physical collection of 41 boxes (17 linear feet, plus some tapes) containing 418 items. The collection is organized into 12 series spanning research on several languages (primarily Kiliwa, Mandan, and Shoshoni, but also Paipai, Mojave, and others studied as part of field methods courses) over many years and including more than 100 notebooks, file slips, sound recordings, loose notes, draft manuscripts, correspondence, conference materials, miscellaneous literature, and copies of the notebooks of other researchers.
  • We accessioned the Gohar Barseghyan Collection of Armenian Films (Indo-European; Armenia), consisting of 43 MiniDV tape recordings of interviews, conversations, and cultural events among Bay Area Armenians. The acquisition of this collection was facilitated by Julianne Kapner; digital transfer and metadata creation were done by then-LRAP students Sophia Hsu and Jeremy Saputo.
  • We accessioned the Roland B. Dixon Papers on California Languages, reorganizing some materials from our miscellaneous holdings and combining them with Dixon's five original notebooks on Chimariko (isolate; California) from work primarily with Polly Dyer, Sally Noble, and Friday in 1906. Also included is a digitized reel of microfilm including a few thousand loose pages of J.P. Harrington's notes on the language held by the National Anthropological Archives.
  • We accessioned the Colección de materiales de la lengua matsigenka de Allen Johnson (BA 1963; Arawakan; Peru), which consists of three series of text transcriptions, loose notes and other manuscripts, and 38 digitized cassette tape recordings from 1972 forward.
  • Scott AnderBois (Brown) and Wilson Silva (Arizona) accessioned Materials of the A'ingae Language Documentation Project (isolate; Ecuador, Colombia), consisting of audiovisual recordings of more than 65 sociolinguistic interviews and 125 texts, with transcription and translation of the texts in associated ELAN files. The project includes collaborators Leidy Quenamá Umenda, Shen Aguinda Ortiz, Martín Criollo Mendúa, Hugo Lucitante, Jorge Mendúa Quenamá, Thalya Mendúa, and Raúl Quieta Lucitante.
  • We made several important sets of microfilmed notes available:
    • 900+ pages of M.A.R. Barker's (1929-2012; PhD 1959) notes on Klamath (Klamath-Modoc; Oregon), seven notebooks made with speakers Aggie (Skellock) Butler, Robert David, Nora Hawk, Lizzie Kirk, Billet Lobert, Marian (David) Martin, Pansy Ohles, and Irene Skellock (bulk 1955-1957).
    • 1,200+ pages of Wick Miller's (1932-1994; PhD 1962) notes on H'aakume Dzeeni (Keresan; New Mexico), 54 texts and 13 notebooks made between 1956 and 1959 with speakers George Garcia, Anne Hansen, Mary Histia, Andrew Lewis, Bell Lewis, Margaret Lim, Mary Valley, and Ruth Valley.
    • 1,100+ pages of Karl Teeter's (1929-2007; PhD 1962) notes on Wiyot (Algic; California), as part of the Karl Teeter Papers on Wiyot and Other Languages, from his collaboration (1956-1958) with Della Prince, Birdie James, Nettie Rossig, and Cy Thomas.
  • Other accessions:

August 31, 2025

Summer summary 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:

  • 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

August 29, 2025

Linguistics events this week (Aug 29-Sep 5, 2025)

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

  • Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday Sep 3 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3:10-4pm
    Round robin catch-up of summer fieldwork and research. All are welcome!
  • Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Sep 5 - 3-4:30pm
    Round robin! Join us again at Amy Rose's house.