News

Big Give is an online fundraising tradition that began in 2014, giving alumni, parents, students, faculty, staff, and friends the chance to come together on one day to support the Berkeley campus community. This year you can show support for:

• The Department of Linguistics
• The California Language Archive
• The PhonLab
• The Script Encoding Initiative, and
• The Society of Linguistics Undergrad Students (SLUgS)

Big Give starts at 9 pm on Wednesday, March 11, and continues through 9 pm on Thursday, March 12, 2026. Watch for our emails around that time — you might even be able to help us win extra money in the hourly contests!

(And if you missed Big Give earlier in the week, not to worry! You can still make donations today.)

Congratulations to Jennifer Kaplan, whose article "Between prescriptivism and polemic: L’écriture inclusive in the opinion pieces of Le Monde, Le Figaro, and Libération" has just appeared in Discourse & Society! Read it here.

Congratulations to Wesley dos Santos (PhD 2024), who is the recipient of the 2026 DELAMAN Award for his archived collection of language documentation materials for Kawahiva! Click here for the full announcement.

Congrats to Amy Rose Deal, whose article "Clausal complementation as relativization, revisited" has just been published in Syntactic Theory and Research. Read it here!

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

• Virtual Career Panel - Friday Mar 6 - Zoom - 3-5pm
  Presenters: Nancy Frishberg, Hadas Kotek, Julia Nee, and Katie Sardinha
• Phorum - Friday Feb 27 - Dwinelle 1229 and Zoom - 4:10-5pm
  Larry M. Hyman (UC Berkeley): "A Gap in OCP Tonal Effects"
• Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Friday Feb 27 - Dwinelle 5125 and Zoom - 2-3pm
  Marguerite Morlan (UC Berkeley): "The Politeness Paradox: Experimental Insights into Language Ideologies in Catalonia"
• Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Friday Mar 6 - Dwinelle 5125 and Zoom - 2-3pm
  Discussion of Montrul 2025, led by Justin Davidson
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Feb 27 - Zoom only - 3:10-4:30pm
  Madelaine O'Reilly-Brown (Stanford): "A new paradigm: Person-conditioned asymmetries in Uyghur nominalized clauses"

Congratulations to Alexandra Pfiffner on the publication of a new article, "Acoustic Cues and Obstruent Devoicing in Minnesotan English," in American Speech. Read it here!

Gašper Beguš gave two talks at the NYU School of Law: an invited Faculty Colloquium and a Distinguished Speaker series talk. More info is available here.

Gašper Beguš was an invited panelist at a MBZUAI x SESE Symposium organized at UC Berkeley. More info is available here.

The massive Oxford Guide to the Bantu Languages (81 chapters, 1196 two-column pages!), edited by Lutz Marten, Ellen Hurst-Harosh, Nancy C. Kula, and Jochen Zeller, was recently published, appearing with the following chapters authored by present and past Berkeley linguists:

• Larry M. Hyman, Chapter 6: Tone
• Josephat Rugemalira (PhD 1993), Chapter 11: Noun classes and agreement
• Thera Marie Crane (PhD 2011), Chapter 28: Lexical structures and lexical semantics
• Jeff Good (PhD 2003), Chapter 32: Historical morphosyntax and syntactic change
• Armindo Ngunga (PhD 1997) & Carlos J. Manuel, Chapter 79: Emakhuwa (P31)

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

• An Evening With Adam Aleksic (@etymologynerd) - Thursday Feb 26 - Grimes Engineering Center 103 - 6-7:15pm
• Ladino/Judeo-Spanish Working Group - Wednesday Feb 25 - Dwinelle 3335 (note the location; no Zoom option) - 1:10-2pm
  Aron Rodrigue (Stanford): "A Ladino Chronicle in the Ottoman Balkans: The Arie Family in the 19th Century"
• Phorum - Friday Feb 20 - Dwinelle 1229 and Zoom - 4:10-5pm
  Noah Macey (UC Berkeley): "What makes an accent 'foreign'? Preliminary evidence from self-supervised speech models"
• Phorum - Friday Feb 27 - Dwinelle 1229 and Zoom - 4:10-5pm
  Larry M. Hyman (UC Berkeley): "A Gap in OCP Tonal Effects"
• Syntax and Semantics Circle and Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Friday Feb 20 - Dwinelle 1229 and Zoom - 3:10-4:30pm
  Alessandro Duranti (UCLA): "Kinds of 'We': The Constitution of Togetherness in Samoan"

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

• Phorum - Friday Feb 13 - Dwinelle 1229 and Zoom - 4:10-5pm
  Kai Schenck (UC Berkeley): "Unsupervised learning at the limits of phonology: Unbounded circumambient patterns"
• Phorum - Friday Feb 20 - Dwinelle 1229 and Zoom - 4:10-5pm
  Noah Macey (UC Berkeley): "What makes an accent 'foreign'? Preliminary evidence from self-supervised speech models"
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Feb 13 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3:10-4:30pm
  Nikolas Webster (UC Santa Cruz): "Delayed argument saturation in Korean double ACC constructions"
• Syntax and Semantics Circle and Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Friday Feb 20 - Location TBA - 3:10-4:30pm
  Alessandro Duranti (UCLA): "Kinds of 'We': The Constitution of Togetherness in Samoan"

Gašper Beguš gave a colloquium talk titled "Understanding Humans, Animals, and Machines" at the Department of Psychology at the University of Michigan on Tuesday, February 10, 2026.

Berkeley Forum, the Berkeley Center for New Media, and the Department of Linguistics are pleased to host An Evening With Adam Aleksic (@etymologynerd) on Thursday, February 26 at 6pm in Grimes Engineering Building 103. Adam will be interviewed by Professor Nicole Holliday about his work on language and social media, how the algorithm affects us all, and his new book, Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language. The event is open to all, but RSVPs via this link are highly recommended!

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

• Ladino/Judeo-Spanish Working Group - Wednesday Feb 11 - Dwinelle 1229 and Zoom - 1:10-2pm
  Benny Ginsberg-Margo (McGill): "Incorporating Sephardic Food and Cooking into Ladino Revitalization: The new Mersi Muncho YouTube Project"
• Language Revitalization Working Group - Wednesday Feb 11 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3:10-4pm
  Isaac L. Bleaman (UC Berkeley): "Bringing Yiddish Home: Reflections on Two Years of New Speaker Parenthood"
• Phorum - Friday Feb 6 - Dwinelle 1229 and Zoom - 4:10-5pm
  (Larry Hyman's talk rescheduled for February 27.)
• Phorum - Friday Feb 13 - Dwinelle 1229 and Zoom - 4:10-5pm
  Kai Schenck (UC Berkeley): "Unsupervised learning at the limits of phonology: Unbounded circumambient patterns"
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Feb 6 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3:10-4:30pm
  Yi-Chi (Yvette) Wu (Harvard): "The decomposition of Philippine-type voice: Implications for phasehood and movement"
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Feb 13 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3:10-4:30pm
  Nikolas Webster (UC Santa Cruz): "Delayed argument saturation in Korean double ACC constructions"