News

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

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.

Here's the latest from the California Language Archive:

• Did you miss our end-of-year newsletter? Read it here!
• We have made available digital copies of 11 cassette tape recordings made by musicologist Susana Weich-Shahak in Peru in 1974 and 1975, consisting of stories, songs, and conversations in Arakmbut (Harakmbut), Ashaninka (Arawakan), Máíjĩ̵̀kì (Tukanoan), and Yagua (Peba-Yaguan), from the communities of Shintuya, Cutivireni, Sucusari, and Catalán, respectively (listen to an excerpt of Luis Ríos's (Bábì) story of Maineno in Máíjĩ̵̀kì here). The larger collection, the Colección de Materiales de Lenguas Peruanas de Susana Weich-Shahak, was previously accessioned, and additionally includes 8mm film and photographic slides, all of which are also now digitized.
• Zachary Wellstood, together with Nellie and R. David Zorc, has accessioned Documenting Aklanon Morphosyntax. The collection consists of materials spanning a field methods course at the University of Maryland in 2018 and 2019, with Maria Polinsky and Omer Preminger (recordings and notes in bundles 001-021), and telephone-based research afterward. The documentation focuses on grammatical topics.

Here are some photos of Berkeley linguists from the 2025 Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (January 9-12 in Philadelphia)!

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

• Ladino/Judeo-Spanish Working Group - Thursday Jan 30 - Dwinelle 1303 - 4-5pm (note the new day, time, and room)
  Echar Lashon (Conversation Hour & Welcome Back! Snacks provided!)
• Language Revitalization Working Group - Wednesday Jan 29 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-4pm
  LR Library Launch & Semester Welcome Event! (Snacks provided. We'll share what LR projects we're all working on this semester. If you can, bring language revitalization books to donate to the library!)
• Phorum - Friday Jan 31 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5pm
  Maksymilian Dąbkowski (UC Berkeley): "The unpredictable but expected deglottalization in some former A'ingae derivatives"

Anushah Hossain (Script Encoding Initiative) gave a talk entitled "ISCII Imperialism: The Legacy of a Devanagari-Centric Character Code" on January 18 at Face/Interface, a conference on global type design at Stanford University.

She also gave an online talk on January 23 for World Endangered Writing Day titled "Script Encoding: The Future," which reviewed the Script Encoding Initiative's past work and new directions.

Congrats to the Berkeley linguists who will be presenting their work at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas, taking place online from January 24 to 26:

• Anna Björklund: "The structure of the Nomlaki verb"
• Maksymilian Dąbkowski: "Teasing the A'ingae discourse and conditional marking apart"
  

The Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies just launched a free (non-credit) Mam class for the spring semester. See here for more information.

Greg LeBlanc's podcast unSILOed features a new interview with Andrew Garrett on "The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall — Revisiting the Past and Renaming the Present" (including both audio and video versions).