News

Berkeley linguists have been very busy this summer! We're happy to share the stories that they submitted to Calques about their adventures and other updates:

• Gašper Beguš was selected as a finalist for the Breakthrough of the Year Award, Falling Walls for his discovery of whale vowels. (Read his interview here.) He published a co-authored paper in Ecological Informatics showing that whales change their coda vowels when ships are present. The paper's findings were reported in The Guardian, National Geographic, BBC, and Popular Science. ConlangCrafter, the model described in his co-authored Proceedings of ACL paper, was featured in Science and IEEE Spectrum. Gašper gave a keynote talk at the 12th International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2 2026) at the University of Vermont. (The recording of the talk is available here.) Finally, he also traveled to Dominica, where he conducted fieldwork experiments on the ocean.
• Highlights of the summer for Amy Rose Deal were WCCFL in Mexico City, where she presented joint work on PCC effects with recent alumna Becky Jarvis; SULA/TripleA in Vancouver, where she presented joint work on future semantics with Shweta Akolkar, Margaret Asperheim, Franco Liu, and Hei Vangz; and Shweta Akolkar's dissertation defense. This summer Amy Rose also started a blog/newsletter called Professing Linguistics and wrote a bunch of blog posts that she will post on Tuesday mornings throughout the fall semester.

• Julianne Kapner gave a presentation at the 4th Armenian Language Workshop at UCLA titled "From Constantinople to the Bay Area: Persistence of Historical /Y/ Variation in Contemporary Bay Area Armenian." She also taught a summer course through the Armenian Studies Program titled "Language in its Social Context: The Case of Armenian" and organized a public lecture series on the sociolinguistics of Armenian.

• The Corpus of Spoken Yiddish in Europe, developed by Isaac Bleaman, was profiled in the Forward newspaper in an article by Yiddish scholar Jeffrey Shandler, and separately in the Forverts in a column written by and for Yiddish language learners.
• Eve Sweetser presented 3 papers:
  - 'Irony and viewpoint embedding in Jane Austen,' presented at the 2nd International Conference of the Cognitive Linguistics Association of North America (CLANA-2), at the University of British Columbia in Kelowna, May 27-29.
  - 'Multimodal blending and proverbs,' co-authored with UCB alum Iksoo Kwon (Hankuk University, Seoul), presented at CLANA-2.
  - 'Embedded viewpoint and joint attention in Jane Austen,' presented at the Cognitive Futures in the Arts and Humanities conference at the Universidade Católica Portuguesa in Lisbon, Portugal, July 15-17.
  CLANA-2 also featured seven presentations by UCB alum Elise Stickles (UBC-Vancouver) and members of her MetaNet project team, and two further presentations by UCB alum Iksoo Kwon and one of his students.
• In July-August 2026, four current and former Berkeley linguists—Hannah Sande, Alice Lee-Kleinberg, Katherine Russell, and Rebecca Jarvis—carried out language documentation work in Côte d'Ivoire, working with speakers of Guébie (Kru), Atchan (Kwa), and three varieties of Aïzi (family undetermined). Sande also co-taught a three-day linguistics workshop for Ivorian linguistics students in Abidjan.
  
  Alice Lee-Kleinberg, Katherine Russell, and Hannah Sande with Guébie speaker Serikpa Gnadja Emile in Gnagbodougnoa, Côte d'Ivoire
  
  
  Hannah Sande, Katherine Russell, Alice Lee-Kleinberg, and Rebecca Jarvis in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire
  
  
  Katherine Russell and Rebecca Jarvis are interviewed by the TV channel NCI at the Yandɔ Jewú generation ceremony in Blockhauss
  
  
• Alan Yu visited the School of Psychology at the Northeast Normal University in Changchun, China, in late June and gave a talk titled "Individual Differences in Perceptual Cue Weighting: Behavioral, Neurophysiological, and Social Considerations." He also co-presented a poster, titled "Subcortical origins of pitch-duration interactions," with Tzu-Yun Tung at LabPhon 20 in Montreal. Below is a picture of some PhonLab alumni at LabPhon 20 this summer.
  
• Berkeley Linguistics, and more specifically graduate student office 1312, was fabulously represented at the 12th Cambridge Conference on Language Endangerment at the University of Cambridge in July. Madeleine Strait gave a brilliant (she did not write this) talk titled "Toponyms as Dialectal Archives: Coast Yurok in the Place Name Record," and Julia Peck presented "Who's Using the F-Words?: Dialect Variation and De Facto Standardization in the Revitalization of Ladino." Aurora Martinez Kane joined them in attendance!
  
• In June, Line Mikkelsen taught an intensive course on non-verbal predication, the topic of her dissertation, at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (photo). In August she worked with kalaallisut archival materials at the Arctic Institute in Copenhagen and then gave a presentation in the Greenlandic cultural association Umiaq in Odense about her collaboration with kalaallisut speakers Grethe Schmidt and Ellen Thrane.
  
• This summer Andrew Garrett raced in the Marin Mile in San Anselmo (June), the OTC Butte to Butte in Eugene (July), and the Cooper Teare Classic in Alameda (August); and he linguisticked at the annual Yurok Language Institute (June), the annual Yurok Family Language Camp (July), and the 19th triennial Methods in Dialectology and Language Diversity conference in Vancouver, BC, where he joined Berkeley linguistics alums Molly Babel (UBC), Yevgeniy Melguy (Chicago), and Andrew Cheng (Hawaii), pictured below.
  
• In June, Rhosean Asmah, Niko Schwarz-Acosta, and Nicole Holliday presented the results of their ongoing work on Memphis AAE to research participants, and collected additional data on neighborhood ideologies.
  
• In August, Nicole Holliday gave a keynote entitled "Evaluative Speech AI and the Devaluation of Sociolinguistic Competence" at the first Sociolinguistics and AI conference at the University of Copenhagen.
  
• The Script Encoding Initiative had a busy summer filled with conference talks and standards meetings, taking the team across the Bay and hopping through Europe:
  • Association Typographique Internationale (Stanford, USA, May 27-30, 2026): Anushah Hossain presented “The Text Stack: Towards a Systems View of Writing.” [Recording]
  • Special Interest Group in Computing, Information, and Society (Berkeley, USA, June 17-18, 2026): Anushah Hossain gave a talk on “Building Blocks: Indic Scripts and the Early Architecture of the Unicode Standard.”
  • ISO/IEC 10646 JTC1/SC2/WG2 (Paris, France, June 22-26, 2026): Debbie Anderson and Anushah Hossain participated in annual meetings about the Universal Coded Character Set.
  • /gʁafematik/ - Grapholinguistics in the 21st Century (Reading, UK, June 24-26, 2026): Anushah Hossain presented a paper with Johannes Bergerhausen and Thomas Huot-Marchand on “A Text Processing Theory of Script.” [Recording]
  • Poggio Civitate Archaeological Excavation (Murlo, Italy, July 14, 2026): Helena Kansa presented “Working with Old Italic: Understanding Unicode to Document Etruscan Writing.”
  Observations from these excursions are summarized in a blog post by Anushah Hossain on the SEI website.
  
• Zachary O'Hagan co-authored an article with Konrad Rybka (Berkeley postdoc 2015-2018) titled "Re-creating an Archival Collection of Wapichan, Atorad, and Other Languages of Guyana," published in Language Documentation and Conservation. He traveled to the Bentley Historical Library at the University in Michigan in May for archival research among the Joseph Beal Steere Papers, which contain unique documentation of multiple Amazonian languages from 1871 and 1872. He incorporated this into fieldwork on Chamikuro in Yurimaguas, Peru with 101-year-old speaker Alfonso Patow Chota. The fieldtrip in June and July also included work on Caquinte in the community of Kitepampani and on Resígaro, in Iquitos, collaborating with Lev Michael with speaker Pablo Andrade Ocagane (pictured). The three languages belong to different branches of the Arawakan family.
  
• Current and former Berkeley linguists were well represented at ACAL 57 in Buffalo, NY in May 2026.
  
• Isaac Bleaman and Reyna Schaechter welcomed their second daughter, Elka, born on August 4. She was warmly received into their Yiddish language nest by big sister Lina.
  
  
  

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.

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.

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.