News

Julian Vargo and Henry Sales Leonel Hernandez gave a workshop with the Bay Area Mam community, teaching speakers how to use the newly developed Mam keyboard and engage with the language digitally.

Congratulations to Alan Yu, who was recently elected as one of the 2025 Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), one of the world's largest general scientific societies. Read more about this major achievement in UC Berkeley News and on the UC Berkeley College of Letters & Science website.

The PhonLab will be hosting a workshop on individual differences in speech and language on April 9 and 10. This workshop brings together researchers working across a broad range of topics. Presentations will cover phonetic processing, syntactic and semantic processing, aging, language acquisition, and speech and language disorders, among other areas.

The full workshop schedule is now available here.

Attendance is free, but registration is required for both in-person and remote attendees. A remote viewing option is available for those unable to attend in person. Please note that remote attendance is for viewing only; live interaction will not be available for remote participants.

To register, please complete this form. We look forward to welcoming you! For more information, email Alan Yu (aclyu@berkeley.edu).

Berkeley linguists past and present are presenting at the 6th Symposium on Amazonian Languages at the University of Alberta, March 27-28, 2026. The event began at Berkeley and was hosted here in 2015, 2017, 2019, and 2022 before rotating elsewhere.

• Sunkulp Ananthanarayan, Padmini Bhagavatula, Ryan Chon, Alina Miller, Gloria Lee, and Myriam Lapierre (PhD 2021), "Double or Nothing: A Historical Perspective on the Inconsistent Emergence of Panāra Geminate Stops"
• Maksymilian Dąbkowski (PhD 2025), "The (Progressively More) Amazonian Character of A'ingae Nasality"
• Franco Liu and Zachary O'Hagan, "Hierarchy Effects in Chamikuro Subject Extraction"
• Fabián Malaver Chaparro, "Temporal Morphology and Nominalization Patterns in Korebajʉ"
• Lev Michael and Samuel Pérez Piahuantse, "Stress and Cyclicity in Pichis Ashéninka"

Marilyn Vihman (PhD 1971; Research Linguist in the department) recently co-edited a special issue of Language and Speech titled "Building Linguistic Systems." The issue features nine papers on early phonological, lexical, and morphological development, drawn from a 2022 workshop held at the University of York to mark Vihman's retirement, along with an introduction she authored.

The Department of Linguistics will host a one-day workshop on Indigenous archival returns on Wednesday, May 6. Participants will share their experiences bringing intangible (and some tangible) heritage and knowledge back from archives to Indigenous communities (mostly in California). Domains of knowledge under discussion will include art, history, language, math, and science. A list of participants is at the workshop website:

https://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~garrett/archival-returns.html

For updates, check this website; for questions, email Andrew Garrett (garrett@berkeley.edu).

Berkeley linguists past and present are attending the Isolate Languages Workshop at Ghent University in Belgium this week:

• Bernat Bardagil (postdoc 2018-2020): "An Anti-Swadesh Look at the Juruena Valley: Charting the Limits of Lexical Comparison across Unrelated Languages"
• Stephanie Farmer (PhD 2015): "Muniche, an isolate no longer?"
• Zachary O'Hagan: "What was the language of the Tabalosos, Lamas, and Suchiches of Peru? Evidence from a 17th-century Census"

The new Undergraduate Academic Building (being completed next to Dwinelle Hall) has a mural, "150W" (150 Years of Women at Berkeley), featuring portraits of 41 individuals. A campus news story is here and a run-down of the individuals is here. Two of the 41 featured individuals were drawn from the department's own "Women in Berkeley Linguistics" webpage, created by a committee whose members were Andrew Garrett, Emily Remirez, Maddy Bossi, Meg Cychosz, and Zach O'Hagan. Notably, too, the women chosen for the UAB installation, Ascención Solórsano (Mutsun) and Laura Fish Somersal (Southern Pomo, Wappo), were part of the broader Berkeley linguistics community by virtue of their roles as engaged collaborators on language projects over many years. This highlights the committee's goals of defining our department community as inclusively as possible.

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

• Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday Mar 18 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4pm
  Panel discussion with Claudia Iron Hawk, Wendy L. A. López Márquez, and Hei Vangz (UC Berkeley): "Identity and Fieldwork: Perspectives from Working within our Communities (Part II)"
• 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"
• Phorum - Friday Mar 20 - Dwinelle 1229 and Zoom - 4:10-5pm
  Marko Drobnjak: "LLM-Assisted Welfare Language Accessibility: A User-Centered Experimental Framework"
• Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Friday Mar 13 - Dwinelle 5125 and Zoom - 2-3pm
  Itxaso Rodríguez-Ordóñez (CSU Long Beach): "Ideological Change in Progress or Age-Grading? Evidence from California's Spanish Perceptual Dialectology"
• Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Friday Mar 20 - Dwinelle 5125 and Zoom - 2-3pm
  Becky Everson (UC Berkeley): Data analysis brainstorm session on results from sociolinguistic/multilingualism surveys, Tjhauba people in Nxamasere, Botswana
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Mar 13 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3:10-4:30pm
  Amy Rose Deal, Margaret Asperheim, Chase Boles, and Alice Lee-Kleinberg (UC Berkeley): "On diagnosing clitic doubling semantically: Amharic objects revisited"
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Mar 20 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3:10-4:30pm
  Aslı Kuzgun (Stanford): "A puzzle in the distribution of genitive case in Turkish"

Dakota Robinson was invited by the Berkeley Center of Excellence in French and Francophone Studies to give a talk on her research. Her presentation, titled "La francophonie et les langues régionales: Multilingualism and language attitudes among contemporary Breton speakers," will take place on Tuesday, March 17, from 12-1pm in the Library of French Thought (Dwinelle 4229). Click here for more information.

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!