The Script Encoding Initiative is hiring a part-time Program Manager! The first deadline for review is February 28th. Learn more about the position here.
All News
February 20, 2025
Congratulations to Anushah Hossain, who will be giving two talks in France this week. She is a keynote speaker at Automatic Type Design 3 , a conference focused on the histories and futures of digital type technologies. She will also represent the Script Encoding Initiative in a talk at UNESCO's Language Technology for All event in honor of International Mother Language Day.
February 18, 2025
Congratulations to Justin Davidson, who has been awarded the Chancellor's Award for Advancing Institutional Excellence and Equity. The award was made in recognition of his "transformative research and advocacy work on Spanish-English bilingualism, exceptional support and mentoring of undergraduate and graduate students, innovative, inclusive teaching practices, and outstanding contributions to disability justice."
February 14, 2025
In and around the Department of Linguistics in the next week:
- Phorum - Friday Feb 14 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5pm
Anna Macknick (UC Berkeley): "Teaching Phonetics in Introductory Linguistics Using Universal Design for Learning" - Phorum - Friday Feb 21 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5pm
Julianne Kapner (UC Berkeley): "Which 'u' and why: Varying vowels in Bay Area Armenian" - Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Feb 14 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
Zachary O'Hagan (UC Berkeley): "Relative Clauses, Interrogative Clauses, and Focus in Chamikuro" - Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Feb 21 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
Margaret Asperheim (UC Berkeley): "Possessors and numerosity predicates in Nukuoro 'have'-constructions"
February 13, 2025
Former Berkeley linguistics graduate student Amy Tan, also the author of The Joy Luck Club, The Backyard Bird Chronicles, and many other books, has donated her papers to UC Berkeley's Bancroft Library. News articles about this gift are in Berkeleyside and the New York Times. (Photo below from the Bancroft Library: Amy Tan in the Rock Bottom Remainders.)
February 12, 2025
Congratulations to Katie Russell on the publication of a chapter on "Tone" in the 3rd edition of the International Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. An Open Access version can be found here.
Congrats to Julianne Kapner, whose Armenian Language in the Bay Area (ALBA) project was featured in an article on the Armenian Studies Program webpage. Click here to read the story.
February 7, 2025
In and around the Department of Linguistics in the next week:
- Linguistics Department Colloquium - Monday Feb 10 - Dwinelle 370 and Zoom (passcode: lx-colloq) - 3:10-4:30pm
Julia Swan (San José State University): "Complementary Perspectives in Studies of Sound Change: A Case Study of Pre-/ɡ/ Merger" - Ladino/Judeo-Spanish Working Group - Thursday Feb 13 - Dwinelle 1303 - 4-5pm
Julian Vargo (UC Berkeley): "Orthographic Variation of Ladino Prenasal Vowels" - Language Revitalization Working Group - Wednesday Feb 12 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-4pm
Anna Macknick (UC Berkeley): "Plain Language Workshop" - Phorum - Friday Feb 7 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5pm
Katie Russell (UC Berkeley): "Local nasalization in Atchan, a language without nasal consonants" - Phorum - Friday Feb 14 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5pm
Anna Macknick (UC Berkeley): "Teaching Phonetics in Introductory Linguistics Using Universal Design for Learning" - Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Feb 7 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
Carol Rose Little (University of Oklahoma): "Dependent case, first person plural and impersonal morphosyntax in Finnish" - Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Feb 14 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
Zachary O'Hagan (UC Berkeley): "Relative Clauses, Interrogative Clauses, and Focus in Chamikuro"
February 6, 2025
Congratulations to Allegra Robertson Molinaro on the publication of an article titled "Laryngealized vowels in Yánesha': A phonetic description and subsegmental analysis" in Folia Linguistica! An Open Access version of the article can be found here.
February 5, 2025
Congratulations to Terry Regier on two recent publications:
- Emil Carlsson, Devdatt Dubhashi, and Terry Regier (2024). Cultural evolution via iterated learning and communication explains efficient color naming systems. Journal of Language Evolution, 9, 49-66.
- Terry Regier and Muhammad Ali Khalidi (2025). A cultural shift in Western perceptions of Palestine. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Nakba Narratives as Language Resources (pp. 9-17), at the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2025).
We are saddened to learn from Caroline Smith that her husband Ian Maddieson died on Sunday, February 2. Ian was Adjunct Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at UC Berkeley and one of the world's leading phoneticians, whose ground-breaking books Patterns of Sounds and The Sounds of the World's Languages (with Peter Ladefoged) shaped contemporary linguistic phonetics.
Congratulations to Julianne Kapner, who will be giving an invited talk (via Zoom) to Project BANG, a subgroup of the Langage, Langues et Cultures d'Afrique research team at INALCO Paris, on March 20. The talk is titled a "Bayesian approach to internal subgroupings within the Kru family."
February 3, 2025
Gašper Beguš appeared on the Demystify Science podcast talking about language, its evolution, and the role of AI in linguistics. Here's the recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efpviD-48G0
Congratulations to Gašper Beguš on the publication of a paper titled "The Development of Indo‐Iranian Voiced Fricatives" in Transactions of the Philological Society. The paper is available in Open Access here.
February 2, 2025
The 2024-2025 colloquium series continues on Monday, February 10, with a talk by Julia Swan (San José State University), taking place in Dwinelle 370 and on Zoom (passcode: lx-colloq) from 3:10-4:30pm. Her talk is entitled "Complementary Perspectives in Studies of Sound Change: A Case Study of Pre-/ɡ/ Merger." The abstract is as follows:
A pronunciation pattern affecting the vowels in FACE, DRESS and TRAP before the voiced velar /ɡ/ has been observed in many North American locales. In these communities, BEG and BAG are variably observed to raise and may merge with BAGEL, which is sometimes described as pre-velar raising or BAG-raising. The feature has been discussed as a diagnostic of variation within the Western U.S. dialect region. Drawing on sociophonetic analysis of young adults in the Pacific Northwest, I explore interspeaker variation and approximate a social meaning for the raised or merged variant. I complement this with a view from a collaborative perceptual study showing that, in communities where the BAG-BAGEL merger is attested in production, listeners also display less sensitivity to the phonemic distinction. Lastly, I provide a limited historical view of BAG-BEG-BAGEL merger to better pinpoint the timing of this development and explore possible explanations for its origins. Taken together, and corroborated by other scholarship, I argue that 1) despite these disparate locales and phonetically variable instantiations, there are unified articulatory and structural motivations for the pre-/ɡ/ phenomena affecting the front vowel system, 2) the phenomenon is best treated as a conditioned vowel merger rather than vowel raising, and 3) the diffusion of this feature among urban, West Coast, American talkers may be limited by its socioindexical meanings. This work underscores the importance of pursuing complementary approaches in the study of sound change that include variationist, community-level distinctions, an understanding of the interactional social meaning of the variants in local contexts, and studies of perception along with production.
January 31, 2025
In and around the Department of Linguistics in the next week:
- Linguistics Department Colloquium - Monday Feb 3 - Dwinelle 370 and Zoom (passcode: lx-colloq) - 3:10-4:30pm
Carol Rose Little (University of Oklahoma): "The syntax of accompanying in Ch’ol (Mayan)" - Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Monday Feb 3 - Dwinelle 5125 and Zoom - 2-3pm
Discussion of our winter break accomplishments and setting research goals for the spring semester! - Phorum - Friday Jan 31 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5pm
Maksymilian Dąbkowski (UC Berkeley): "The unpredictable but expected deglottalization in some former A'ingae derivatives" - Phorum - Friday Feb 7 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5pm
Katie Russell (UC Berkeley): "Local nasalization in Atchan, a language without nasal consonants"
January 30, 2025
Congratulations to Maksymilian Dąbkowski on his upcoming presentation, "The forms and meanings of A’ingae derived nouns," at the 22nd Old-World Conference in Phonology (OCP22) hosted at the University of Amsterdam on February 5-7.
On Tuesday, February 4 at 1PM at 1102 Berkeley Way West, Gašper Beguš will give a colloquium talk for the Department of Psychology titled "Building realistic models of language with deep learning." Click here for more information. All are welcome to attend!
Gašper Beguš was recently featured on the Wild Interest podcast (created by kids to communicate science to young audiences). You can listen to the episode (featuring other researchers such as zoologist Katy Payne) here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/animal-talk-part-one/id1728574320?i=1000685833202
January 29, 2025
Congratulations to Isaac Bleaman, who will be giving an invited research talk titled "Holocaust Testimonies in Yiddish Language Research and Pedagogy" at the UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies on February 24. More info is available here.
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