Congratulations to Anushah Hossain, whose article "Unsettled Scripts: Script Invention and the Bind of Digital Recognition" has just appeared in Modern Languages Open! Read it here.
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March 11, 2026
Research by Gašper Beguš was recently featured in a Scientific American story on animal communication. His research on latent spaces in AI, literature, and art was featured in the Harvard Gazette newsletter (story here).
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.)
March 10, 2026
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.
March 9, 2026
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.
March 5, 2026
Here's the latest from the California Language Archive:
- We accessioned digital copies of Narcisa Higuera Rosemyre's seven wax cylinder recordings of Tongva and Serrano (Uto-Aztecan; California) songs made by George Henry Taylor (see catalog items 24-3213 through 24-3219).
- We accessioned a sneak peek (two items) of the new collection Materiales del Proyecto del Idioma Mixteco de San Juan Piñas (Oto-Manguean; Mexico), which will be added to in the coming months. This is a collaboration among maestras Claudia Juárez Chávez, Basilisa Pérez Morelos, and Cirila Pérez Morelos, and linguists Gabriela Caballero (PhD 2008), Claudia Duarte Borquez, Tylar Kameda, Maxine Van Doren, and Michelle Yuan.
- We accessioned the Knud Lambrecht Papers (PhD 1986), consisting largely of draft and published articles and associated notes and correspondence, with an empirical focus on topics in English and French semantics and pragmatics. The CLA acquired the materials from an estate sale at Prof. Lambrecht's home in 2019.
- Becky Everson accessioned the new collection Shekgalagadi of the Tjhauba Field Materials (Bantu; Botswana), consisting of more than 90 audiovisual recordings of elicitation sessions, picture identification tasks, procedural texts, and ethnographic and sociolinguistic interviews.
- We accessioned three new series to the Kenneth W. Whistler Papers on Indigenous Languages (PhD 1980) dedicated to his projects on Proto-Yokuts (007, with Victor Golla), Nuu-chah-nulth (008; Wakashan, British Columbia), and Alsea (009; Penutian, Oregon). Dr. Whistler donated the materials to the CLA in 2025.
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 - Ladino/Judeo-Spanish Working Group - Wednesday Mar 11 - Dwinelle 1229 and Zoom - 1:10-2pm
Shaked Gabbay (Boston University): "Documenting and creating learning materials for Ladino" - Phorum - Friday Mar 13 - Dwinelle 1229 and Zoom - 4:10-5pm
Lev Michael (UC Berkeley) and Samuel Piahuantze (Ashéninka community linguist): "Stress and (non-)cyclicity in Pichis Ashéninka" - 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 Mar 13 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3:10-4:30pm
Talk by Amy Rose Deal (UC Berkeley)
March 3, 2026
Congrats to Amy Rose Deal, whose article "Clausal complementation as relativization, revisited" has just been published in Syntactic Theory and Research. Read it here!
February 27, 2026
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"
February 26, 2026
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!
February 25, 2026
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.
February 24, 2026
Gašper Beguš was an invited panelist at a MBZUAI x SESE Symposium organized at UC Berkeley. More info is available here.
February 23, 2026
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)
February 19, 2026
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"
February 18, 2026
Kai Schenck is giving a talk titled "Unsupervised learning at the limits of phonology: Unbounded circumambient patterns" at the Stanford Phonetics and Phonology Workshop on February 27.
February 13, 2026
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"
February 11, 2026
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.
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!
February 9, 2026
A collaboration between artist Agnieszka Kurant and Gašper Beguš titled Phantomatics was exhibited in the Marian Goodman Gallery in New York. The opening night was on February 6, 2026. The exhibition will be open until March 21, 2026. More info is available here.
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