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May 14, 2026

Yu speaks at UCSC

Alan Yu will be giving a colloquium talk at the Department of Languages and Applied Linguistics (LAAL) at UC Santa Cruz on May 22. His talk is titled "Crowdsourcing Research on Language Variation and Change in Hong Kong."

Berkeley linguists @ ASA

Several members of the department will be presenting papers at the spring meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, taking place May 11-15 in Philadelphia:

May 13, 2026

Beguš in Venice

Phantomatics, an art installation that resulted from a collaboration between Agnieszka Kurant and Gašper Beguš, is exhibited at Palazzo Diedo concurrent with the Venice Biennale and curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist.

Beguš co-edits special issue of Linguistics Vanguard

Vsevolod Kapatsinski and Gašper Beguš guest edited a special issue of Linguistics Vanguard titled "Implications of Neural Networks and Other Learning Models for Linguistic Theory."

They also authored an editorial titled "Implications of learning models for linguistic theory: The richness of memory, the importance of loss, and the emergence of structure." Read the paper here.

May 11, 2026

Johnson's spring activities

Keith Johnson reports a number of activities in the spring semester:

  • A joint talk with Alexandra Pfiffner on the Voices of Oakland project at the Stanford Speech and Cognition Lab (Berkeley alumna Meg Cychosz's new lab) - March 11.
  • A Phonlab workshop and undergraduate honors thesis defense at the University of Pittsburgh, visiting Berkeley alumni Jevon Heath, Melinda Fricke and their children Malcom and Josie - April 16-18.
  • Another Phonlab workshop and colloquium talk on "Vowels in the Brain" at the University of Kentucky, visiting Berkeley former visiting student Kevin McGowan - April 23-25.
  • This semester Keith also joined the editorial board of Phonetica.

May 10, 2026

Berkeley linguists @ PɸF 2026

Several present and past Berkeley linguists will be presenting at the Princeton Phonology Forum on Register and Tonal Representation, taking place May 15-16, 2026:

  • Pius Akumbu (visiting scholar, 2015-2016): "Features and tonal representation in Grassfields Bantu"
  • Gabriela Caballero (PhD 2008): "Register and tonal representation in San Juan Piñas Mixtec (Tò’ōn Ndá’ví)"
  • Larry Hyman: "On some cases of tone that come close to being register, but don’t quite make it"
  • Florian Lionnet (PhD 2016): "Severing register from tone: Downstep in the languages of New Caledonia"
  • Nicholas Rolle (PhD 2018) will lead a discussion.
Yiddish corpus milestone

The Corpus of Spoken Yiddish in Europe has just published a new batch of interviews and surpassed the 300-hour milestone! As of today, 326.3 hours of manually transcribed speech from 171 Yiddish-speaking Holocaust survivors are available to the public online. The corpus is being developed with Isaac Bleaman's NSF CAREER grant.

Wellstood dissertation presentation

Congratulations to Zachary Wellstood, who will be presenting his dissertation, "Aspects of tone in Cua," on Monday, May 18 from 9:30-11am (Pacific) in 3401 Dwinelle Hall and on Zoom. All are welcome to attend! Note that the presentation will start precisely at 9:30, not on Berkeley time.

Berkeley linguists @ ACAL 57 & Bantoid 3

Several current and former UC Berkeley linguistics affiliates will be presenting at two co-located conferences at the University at Buffalo: the Annual Conference on African Linguistics (ACAL 57) (May 21-23) and the Third Conference on Bantoid Languages and Linguistics (Bantoid 3) (May 20-21). The full programs are available here.

  • Pius W. Akumbu (Visiting Scholar 2015-16): "Low tone anticipatory spreading in Babanki: A typological anomaly"
  • Pius W. Akumbu & Jeffrey Wills: "Concord and prefix interaction in Bantoid: The case of class 7 kV- and a-"
  • Matthew Faytak (PhD 2018) et al.: "Nasal aerodynamics of the Gbagyi syllable"
  • Larry M. Hyman & Daniel Ibrahim Kamara: "Noun Class and Number Marking in Limba (Thɔnkɔ Dialect)"
  • Rebecca Jarvis & Katherine Russell: "Assessing language shift in an urban West African context: Two investigations of Atchan language use"
  • Alice Lee-Kleinberg: "The semantics of definiteness in Amharic"
  • Florian Lionnet (PhD 2016): "Subtractive Morphology in Fanya (Bua, Chad)"
  • Nafisa Rashid: "An Insight into Accent Shifting through Vowel Monophthongization in the Ghanaian-American Singer Amaarae"
  • Nicholas Rolle (PhD 2018) [ACAL Plenary]: "Tone diachrony beyond tonogenesis: Reconstructing the tone melodies of Proto-Edoid (Niger-Congo)"
  • Nicholas Rolle: "The MPaNCA Project: Findings in the noun class morphomics of Bantoid"
  • Katherine Russell & Hannah Sande: "Two typologically distinct nasality systems in West Africa: A nasal and oral airflow study of Atchan (Kwa) and Guébie (Kru)"
McLaughlin publishes three chapters

Mairi McLaughlin has just published three chapters in edited volumes on translation:

  • McLaughlin, Mairi and Nicholas Brownlees (2026) "Language and Translation in the Early English and French Press (1620-1649)." In News Translation and Intertextuality in the British and International Press, 1600-1960s, ed. by Matylda Włodarczyk and Nicholas Brownlees, Palgrave Macmillan, 25-50.
  • Matylda Włodarczyk, Nicholas Brownlees and Mairi McLaughlin (2026) "Contextualising news translation and intertextuality in a historical perspective." In News Translation and Intertextuality in the British and International Press, 1600-1960s, ed. by Matylda Włodarczyk and Nicholas Brownlees, Palgrave Macmillan, 1-22.
  • McLaughlin, Mairi (2026) "Translation and its Effects in the First Francophone American Newspaper, the Gazette françoise (1780-1781)." In Translation and Diaspora: The role of translation in émigré communities in the USA, ed. by Brian James Baer and Nike K. Pokorn, Routledge, 2026.

May 7, 2026

Updates from our graduating seniors 2026

We wrote to our soon-to-be and very recent undergraduate alumni (spring 2026, fall 2025, and summer 2025) for updates on their plans after graduation. Here are the stories they shared with us:

  • Sam Poder (BA 2026) will be returning to UC Berkeley as a Master's student in EECS with a focus on programming languages.
  • Yueyi Gu (BA 2026) will be starting her PhD program in Psychology at the University of Iowa in the fall, studying speech processing and communication disorders in children.
  • Christine Song (BA 2026) will be starting a job as a paralegal at Law Offices of Kyung Hee Lee, PC in LA in July.
  • Mahsa Mir (BA 2026) will be starting a children’s literature editorial fellowship at Chronicle Books in June.
  • Joie Hua (BA 2025) will begin her Master's in Speech-Language Pathology at San Jose State University in fall 2026.
  • Hadley (BA 2026) will be working in Machine Learning/Natural Language Processing before pursuing PhD programs.
  • Minseo Bang (BA 2025) will be starting a Master's program in Communication Sciences and Disorders, Bilingual Extension Track, at Teachers College, Columbia University in fall 2026.
  • Nyssa Combs (BA 2026) will be pursuing a Master of Science in Speech Language Pathology at San Jose State University starting in fall 2026.
  • Annah Brice (BA 2026) will be continuing her work with UC Berkeley New Student Services through the summer before pursuing a master's degree in Speech and Language Pathology.
  • Amarís Albini (BA 2026) will be attending Cal State East Bay to earn her Master's Degree in Speech-Language Pathology in fall 2026.

Congratulations, everyone!

Robinson receives dissertation fellowships

Congratulations to Dakota Robinson, who has been awarded a UC Dissertation-Year Fellowship for the 2026-2027 academic year, as well as a dissertation fellowship from the American Association of University Women.

May 6, 2026

Holliday's research featured in Berkeley News

Nicole Holliday was recently featured in Berkeley News's new "After Office Hours" series. Her interview touches on how speech cues reveal information about a speaker's age, region, and identity, and what that means as AI-generated voices become part of everyday life.

May 5, 2026

Bleaman presents on Yiddish ASR

Isaac Bleaman will be (remotely) delivering a paper titled "Automatic Transcription of Holocaust Testimonies in Yiddish: Orthographic Comparison and Cross-Domain Validation" at the Second Workshop on Holocaust Testimonies as Language Resources (HTRes-2026), taking place during the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2026) in Palma de Mallorca on May 11.

Russell dissertation

Congratulations to Katherine Russell, who will be presenting her dissertation, "Atchan nasalization: Synchrony, diachrony and typology," on Monday, May 11 from 2-4pm (Pacific) in 3335 Dwinelle Hall and on Zoom. All are welcome to attend!

Sande, Clem, and Dąbkowski publish in Language

Hannah Sande, Emily Clem, and Maksymilian Dąbkowski published "Discontinuous vowel harmony in Guébie: Cyclic interleaving of syntax and phonology" in Language. The article is available here.

May 4, 2026

Beguš at MIT/Harvard workshop

Gašper Beguš gave a talk titled "Language as Informative Imagitation" at a workshop on Invented, Constructed, and Emergent Languages in Multi-agent AI Systems at Harvard Kempner and MIT (program) on Monday, May 4.

May 3, 2026

Beguš in Proceedings of ACL

A paper by Gašper Beguš and collaborators is coming out in the Proceedings of ACL. The paper, titled "ConlangCrafter: Constructing Languages with a Multi-Hop LLM Pipeline," introduces a multihop pipeline for generating new constructed languages and is available here. You can try out the model here.

Berkeley linguists @ WAIL 28

Several Berkeley linguists participated in the Workshop on American Indigenous Languages (WAIL 28) at UC Santa Barbara on May 1-2. Madeleine Strait gave a talk titled "Recovering Place Names from the Archive: A Coast Yurok Case Study," Claudia Iron Hawk gave a talk titled "Second Language Learning Methods for the Lakota Language," Tyler Lee-Wynant gave a talk titled "Revitalizing Northern Pomo numbers," and Tzintia Montaño Ramírez moderated a session on "Language Activism." Julia Peck was in attendance as official Berkeley Linguistics cheerleader.

May 1, 2026

Linguistics events this week (May 1-8, 2026)

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