News

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

• Annual Meeting on Phonology - Thursday-Saturday Sep 25-27 - Sutardja Dai Hall and Dwinelle Hall
• Linguistics Department Colloquium - Monday Sep 29 - Dwinelle 370 and Zoom (passcode: lx-colloq) - 3:10-4:30pm
  Florian Lionnet (Princeton): "Areal alignment and the phonological diversification of Bua languages (Chad)"
• Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday Oct 1 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4pm
  Bernat Bardagil (Ghent): "Traces of (language) contact in the Guaporé-Mamoré region of southern Amazonia"
• Ladino/Judeo-Spanish Working Group - Friday Sep 26 - Dwinelle 3401 and Zoom - 10:10-11:00am
  Hélène Jawhara Piñer: "Holiday Tables, Ladino Voices: Sephardic Traditions Across Generations"
• Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Friday Sep 26 - Dwinelle 5125 - 3-4pm
  Research check-in/writing time
• Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Friday Oct 3 - Dwinelle 5125 - 3-4pm
  Talk by Shulin Liu (UC Berkeley)
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - October 3 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3:10-4:30pm
  Bernat Bardagil (Ghent): "Interlocutor morphology in Mỹky"

Aurora Martinez Kane has just concluded her tenure as a Greenleaf Visiting Scholar at the University of New Mexico. On her two-month trip, she did a mix of work with archival materials and field interviews with New Mexican Spanish speakers for her dissertation project in consultation with UNM faculty and archivists.

Larry Hyman gave a colloquium at the University of Rochester on September 12: "Prosodic domains in the Bantu noun phrase."

He also made a presentation on "Limba verb extensions in Niger-Congo perspective" in Nadine Grimm's "Languages of Africa" class on September 11, 2025.

The 2025-2026 Linguistics Colloquium series continues on Monday, September 29, with a talk by Florian Lionnet (Princeton). The talk will take place in Dwinelle 370 and synchronously via Zoom (password: lx-colloq) from 3:10-4:30pm. The title is "Areal alignment and the phonological diversification of Bua languages (Chad)" and the abstract is as follows:

Bua languages (Niger-Congo) form a relatively compact group of 10 languages spoken by small communities in southern Chad. The group is split into two noticeably different branches: Riverine languages along the Middle Chari River, and Inland languages further east. Comparative data shows that proto-Bua had a vowel system characterized by an ATR contrast and ATR harmony, three contrastive plosive series (voiceless, voiced, implosive), and a two-tone system.

In this talk, I show how Riverine languages lost the ATR contrast, reinterpreted ATR harmony as height harmony, developed interior vowels, enriched the plosive system with a series of prenasalized consonants, and innovated a third tone. I also show that Inland languages, on the other hand, maintained the proto-Bua ATR contrast and harmony, but drastically simplified the three-way plosive contrast, to the point of having no laryngeal contrast at all in some languages.

I argue that the changes that took place in Riverine Bua languages are the result of areal alignment, that is, a historical alignment of their sound systems to the phonological profile found in the Middle Chari area where they are spoken, and more generally in the Central African linguistic area. This alignment was made possible by the language ecology in which these languages are spoken, an ecology characterized by egalitarian multilingualism. The characteristics of the Inland phonological systems, on the other hand, cannot be attributed to the influence of any areal signal.

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

• Annual Meeting on Phonology - Thursday-Saturday Sep 25-27 - Sutardja Dai Hall and Dwinelle Hall
• Ladino/Judeo-Spanish Working Group - Friday Sep 26 - Dwinelle 1229 and Zoom - 10:10-11am
  Hélène Jawhara Piñer: "Holiday Tables, Ladino Voices: Sephardic Traditions Across Generations"
• Phorum - Friday Sep 19 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4:10-5pm
  AMP Practice Talks by Maksymilian Dąbkowski & Kai Schenck
• Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Friday Sep 19 - Dwinelle 5125 - 3-4pm
  Riley VanMeter (UC Berkeley): "Perceptions of 'Extravagance': Quantifying Attitudes of Varying Stages of Grammaticalization"
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Sep 19 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3:10-4:30pm
  Aidan Katson (UC Santa Cruz): "Expanding the nominal in English ACC- and POSS-ing nominalizations"

A paper on whale vowels by Gašper Beguš, Ronald Sprouse, and collaborators was recently featured in a news feature in the journal Nature.

Naitian Zhou, David Bamman, and Isaac L. Bleaman have published an article titled "Culture is not trivia: Sociocultural theory for cultural NLP" in Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Read it here!

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

• Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday Sep 17 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4pm
  Becky Jarvis, Andrew Liu, and Katie Russell: "Developing community-facing story corpus web resources"
• Phorum - Friday Sep 12 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4:10-5pm
  Anna Björklund (UC Berkeley): "Highlights in Nomlaki phonetics"
• Phorum - Friday Sep 19 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4:10-5pm
  AMP Practice Talks
• Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Friday Sep 12 - Dwinelle 5125 - 3-4pm
  Welcome, part II! Introductions, research updates, scheduling and resource-sharing
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Sep 12 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Eli Sharf and Emily Knick (UC Santa Cruz): "On focus and the perfect aspect"
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Sep 19 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Aidan Katson (UC Santa Cruz): TBA

Congratulations to Allegra Robertson Molinaro (PhD 2025), who will start her new job on September 22 as a Computational Linguist & Data Annotation Lead at Wispr, a voice dictation company based in San Francisco. There she will be working on speech recognition and style personalization to help adapt the tool to diverse speakers and contexts.

Congratulations to Amber Galvano, who has just accepted a full-time position as a Linguistic Engineer at Meta after having spent the summer working as a Linguistic Engineering Intern, and will finish her dissertation remotely from the Seattle area.

Dear colleagues, friends, and family,

You are warmly invited to join us in celebrating Robin Tolmach Lakoff's life and her immense impact on Linguistics and beyond. The UC Berkeley Department of Linguistics will be hosting a memorial service at the Alumni House, UC Berkeley, on Sunday, November 2, 2025, from 1-4 p.m. PST. This gathering will provide an opportunity to honor Robin's memory, share stories, and connect with one another.

To assist us with event planning, please contact Susan Luong for the RSVP form, which includes an option to share a reflection or memory of Robin that may be incorporated into the tribute.

We hope you can join us as we remember and celebrate a truly remarkable individual.

With sincere regards,
Prof. Peter Jenks, Chair
Department of Linguistics, UC Berkeley

(Image: Robin Lakoff during RobinFest in May 2012, courtesy of Sharon Inkelas)

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

• Linguistics Department Colloquium - Monday Sep 8 - Dwinelle 370 and Zoom (passcode: lx-colloq) - 3:10-4:30pm
  Jody Kreiman (UCLA): "What do listeners know about voices?"
• Ladino/Judeo-Spanish Working Group - Tuesday Sep 9 - Dwinelle 1229 - 3:40-4:30pm
  Beginner-friendly conversation hour (introducing ourselves and our families), SNACKS!
• Language Revitalization Working Group - Wednesday Sep 10 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3:10-4pm
  Fall Welcome - Join us for snacks, socializing, and taking turns sharing about the LR work we're involved with. It'll also be an opportunity to ask for and give advice about projects. No need to prepare anything - come as you are!
• Phorum - Friday Sep 5 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4:10-5pm
  Zachary O'Hagan (UC Berkeley): "Phonologically Conditioned Allomorphy in Chamikuro"
• Phorum - Friday Sep 12 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4:10-5pm
  Anna Björklund (UC Berkeley): Dissertation exit talk
• Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Friday Sep 5 - Dwinelle 5125 - 3-4pm
  Welcome! Introductions, research updates and goal setting
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Sep 5 - 3-4:30pm
  Round robin! Join us again at Amy Rose's house.

Larry Hyman has published a chapter entitled "Tone" (pp. 56-64) in The Oxford Guide to the Bantu Languages, edited by Lutz Marten, Ellen Hurst-Harosh, Nancy C. Kula, and Jochen Zeller (Oxford University Press, 2025).