Berkeley linguists have been very busy this summer! We're happy to share the stories that they submitted to Calques about their summer adventures:
- Maksymilian Dąbkowski gave a talk on Laryngeal metrical feet in Cofán at Collegium Invisibile's Spring Camp, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. He received the American Philosophical Society's Lewis and Clark Fund for Exploration and Field Research on Stress and glottalization across lexical classes in A'ingae (or Cofán; Ecuador). He also conducted five weeks of in-person fieldwork on A'ingae in the community of Sinangoé (Sucumbíos, EC), collected over 37 hours of audiovisual recordings (of which 9 hours fully transcribed and translated), spanning different genres, including autobiographies, family and community histories, shamanic stories, traditional activities, mythological accounts, as well as chants, songs, and instrumental music
- Amber Galvano attended ACAL 55 and LabPhon 19 to present on NC voicing dissimilation in Tonko Limba with Daniel Ibrahim Kamara (talk and poster, respectively), as well as ASA 186 to present on her QP2 on the sociophonetics of sexuality in spontaneous speech (poster). She also joined D-Lab for the Data Science for Social Justice Workshop, and will continue working with them this year as a Data Science Fellow, and worked for Lumiere Education as a mentor to two high-schoolers writing their first linguistics research papers.
- Lindsay Hatch, Becky Jarvis, Alexandra Pfiffner, and Katie Russell visited Côte d'Ivoire in July and August. They conducted documentation work with speakers of Atchan (ISO: ebr; Lindsay, Becky, Alexandra, Katie), Nghwla (ISO: gwa; Lindsay, Katie, Alexandra), Guébié (ISO: gie; Katie), and Lobi (ISO: lob; Katie). They met with their collaborator, Tchaman linguist Maxime Dido, and attended a Fachwe (generation celebration) and enthronement of a new chief in the village of Blockhauss.
- Julia Peck gave a talk (in the same session as Madeleine Strait!) titled At-Home Language Nesting for Ladino: Reflections on an Emerging Language Revitalization Strategy at the 10th Cambridge Conference on Language Endangerment. She also walked 300 kilometers on the Camino de Santiago (del Norte) pilgrimage through Northern Spain and the Basque Country, raising funds for Gazan families' crowdfunding campaigns. She published an article in the Turkish-Jewish magazine Avlaremoz about a newly (re-)discovered mikvah/mikvé (Jewish ritual bath) in Galicia, Spain. The published version was translated into Turkish but the English original can be read here. She was the featured speaker in a 4-part video series by Ladino21, a Ladino revitalization Youtube channel. Here's one of the videos (they're all in Ladino!).
- Nafisa Rashid was awarded the National Science Foundation's Graduate Research Fellowship to support her research and studies in Linguistics! She is honored to have received this prestigious graduate fellowship and is looking forward to starting graduate school at UC Berkeley this month.
- Dakota Robinson presented a paper at the 12th International Conference on Language Variation in Europe (ICLaVE) in Vienna, Austria: "Variation in Breton rhotics: Modelling social and psycholinguistic factors"
- Oliver Whitmore presented at the conference Minority Languages in European Societies: Documenting, safeguarding, planning in Turin & Bard, Italy. The presentation took place inside 19th century fortress! He was also interviewed by Cheminez about his revitalization work with Occitan. The interview is available (in French) at this link He has been invited to serve as the linguistics bibliographer for the journal Tenso.
- Marko Drobnjak, a Fulbright visitor to Berkeley Speech and Computation Lab, successfully defended his dissertation at the Faculty of Law, University of Ljubljana under his co-advisor Gašper Beguš. Congrats, Marko!
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Zach O'Hagan spent several weeks in Peru, first as CLA manager facilitating the return of historical photographs to the Kukamiria community of Achual Tipishca, then documenting the highly endangered Chamikuro language (Arawakan) with 99-year-old speaker Alfonso Patow Chota in Yurimaguas. (Lev Michael continued the collaboration a few weeks later.) In July, Zach represented the CLA in a roundtable titled "Interfering in Our Discipline: Working with Individual Anthropologists' Written and Audiovisual Legacies" at the annual meeting of the European Association of Social Anthropologists in Barcelona, followed by research time at the Archivo General de Indias in Seville.
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Gašper Beguš's research was featured in several domestic and international press venues: Harvard Magazine (link), Inside Higher Ed (link), a French science magazine Epsiloon, the Croatian newspaper of record Večernji List, and the Slovenian magazine Outsider. He gave a talk on "Understanding humans and non-humans" at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, presented at the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2024) in Rotterdam, Netherlands on "Basic syntax from speech: Spontaneous concatenation in unsupervised deep neural networks", gave an invited talk titled ``AI as a Tool for Discovery in Animal Communication'' at the Decoding Communication in Nonhuman Species III workshop at the Simons Institute (video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1tpbsKRgNw), gave an invited talk titled "Causal AI interpretability and sperm whale communication system" at the Laboratory for Underwater Systems and Technologies, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, University of Zagreb, gave an invited talk titled "AI Interpretability, neural processing of language, and animal communication'' at the Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience, UC Berkeley (video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2pPcUZiPdI), and gave an invited talk titled ``Understanding communication in non-human species'' at the Antikythera workshop in London, UK.
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Chris Beier and Lev Michael went to Peru late May. Lev gave two invited talks while in Lima: ‘La reconstrucción de la fonología del proto-nihagantsi [The reconstruction of Proto-Nihagantsi phonology]’ at the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos; and ‘Las lenguas arawak peruanas: Su clasificación y dispersión geográfica [The Peruvian Arawakan languages: Their classification and geographical distribution]’ at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. Also in Lima, Chris and Lev met with representatives of UNESCO to coordinate Iquito language revitalization activities. Earlier in the year, Chris had provided linguistic material and consultation for a UNESCO project to produce short videos intended to support Iquito language revitalization. In June, Chris and Lev traveled to the Iquito community of San Antonio de Pintuyacu, where they completed two 140-page Iquito revitalization textbooks in collaboration with Iquito speaker Jaime Pacaya Inuma, community members Marcelo Inuma Sinchija and Hilter Panduro Güimack, and the Peruvian Ministry of Education. These textbooks will be distributed by the Ministry of Education for use in the Iquito community schools. Lev also stayed on in the community to do additional research with speaker Jaime Pacaya. In July, Lev visited the Máíhùnà community of Nueva Vida for one week. During the latter part of July and early August, Lev traveled to Yurimaguas, Peru, to work with 99-year old Alfonso Patow Chota, who is probably the most fluent living speaker of Chamicuro, a minimally documented Arawakan language.
- Andrew Garrett's academic summer had five highlights: 1) At the end of May, Andrew participated in this year's Breath of Life Archival Institute for Indigenous California Languages, where he had a chance to learn from the many California language leaders, activists, teachers, and learners who came to the Berkeley campus to work with archival materials. 2) Throughout the summer, Andrew joined the Yurok Tribe language staff and summer interns for biweekly Zoom meetings on grammar, vocabulary, and texts. 3) In Berkeley, Andrew worked with Rhosean Asmah and Madeleine Strait on Yurok archival materials and with Kai Schenck on Yurok rhotic vowel harmony. 4) In early June, Andrew joined Victoria Carlson (Yurok Tribe language program manager) and Caroline Le Guin on the Klamath River, where Caroline returned three baskets that had been given more than a century ago to her grandfather Alfred Kroeber, who left them to his daughter Ursula K. Le Guin. Pictured below are Andrew, Caroline, Victoria, and Victoria's mother Noreen Jones (photo by Dewey Jones); at least one of the baskets was made by Victoria and Noreen's relative (and Kroeber's friend) Dr. Jennie of Sregon. 5) Among non-work-related adventures, in May in Danville, CA, Andrew raced in the USA Track & Field Masters 1 Mile National Championship. He was delighted to place 16th out of 21 in his age group.
- Nicole Holliday went to Leiden to present her research of AAE/Chicano English contact voice quality at Speech Prosody. She is also looking forward to attending Interspeech in Kos, Greece in a couple of weeks!
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Mairi McLaughlin published two co-edited books with Oxford University Press this summer. The first is The Oxford Handbook of the French Language which she co-edited with Wendy Ayres-Bennett. It is the first interdisciplinary English-language handbook of French and it offers a wide-ranging approach to the rich, varied, and exciting research that is being done on French across multiple subfields. A total of 32 chapters are arranged into seven broad thematic sections covering the structures of French; the history of French; axes of variation; French around the world; French in contact with other languages; second language acquisition; and French in literature, culture, arts, and the media. With Janice Carruthers and Olivia Walsh, Mairi also published Historical and Sociolinguistic Approaches to French, a volume containing 18 chapters which showcase the most innovative current scholarship in historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, and in the burgeoning field of historical sociolinguistics. There will be a book launch for this event online at 9am California time on 11/6 and everyone is welcome to attend! For more information and to register for the event, click here.
- Work by Prof. Nicole Holliday and former Berkeley Linguistics Prof. John McWhorter was features in this week's election-related news. See the stories in the SF Chronicle, New York Times, and Berkeley News.
- Thanks to assistant Madison Fanucchi, we made available 114 digital files corresponding to over 80 reel-to-reel tapes of sound recordings of 39 North American Indigenous languages (see here for list). The tapes, made primarily between 1940 and 1980, are held by the Hearst Museum of Anthropology, and were digitized thanks to a Preservation Implementation grant from the GRAMMY Museum.
- We reaccessioned 194 items consisting of digital copies of wax cylinder recordings of 25 languages (see here for list), primarily California Indigenous languages. The original cylinders are held by the Hearst Museum. This reduces the remainder of wax cylinder recordings previously unavailable following the conclusion of our National Endowment for the Humanities-funded project "Linguistic and Ethnographic Sound Recordings from Early Twentieth-Century California: Optical Scanning, Digitization & Access," also known as Project IRENE.
- We accessioned the Geoffrey Gamble Collection of Sound Recordings of Wukchumni and Other Languages. This replaces collection LA97, which originally consisted of tapes only from 1973 and, later, 1974, and adds in previously unavailable recordings from 1970, 1971, 1972, and 1975 (42 tapes total, Series I), together with recordings of five other languages (11 tapes, Series II). The Wukchumni recordings primarily feature Cecile Silva, together with her sisters Virginia Aguilar and Mary Friedricks. Other individuals whose voices are heard are Ruby Bays and Beatrice Francis (Yawelmani); Bennard Dallas (Hopi); Harold Ides, Y. Larson, Helen Peterson, and Ruth Claplanhoo (Makah).
- Zachary O'Hagan accessioned new audio and video recordings into the collection "Caquinte Field Materials" (see catalog items 2014-13.119 through 2014-13.129), based on work with Antonia Salazar Torres and Emilia Sergio Salazar in Peru in 2022.
Alfonso Patow and Zach O'Hagan in Yurimaguas, Peru, July 2024.
Elias (son of Prof. Hannah Sande) and Line (daughter of Prof. Isaac Bleaman) exploring the world together
The 19th century fortress where Whitmore presented at a conference.whitemore
Book cover for McLaughlin and co-editors' "Historical and Sociolinguistic Approaches to French"