Linguistics Department News (Calques)

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

• Ladino/Judeo-Spanish Working Group - Wednesday Apr 8 - Dwinelle 1229 and Zoom - 1:10-2pm
  Talk by Claire Lozano (Macalester) on the morphophonology of diminutives in Judeo-Spanish
• Phorum - Friday Apr 3 - Dwinelle 1229 and Zoom - 4:10-5pm
  Jinyoung Jo (Stanford): "Can Large Language Models Predict English Phrasal Stress?"
• Phorum - Friday Apr 10 - Dwinelle 1229 and Zoom - 4:10-5pm
  Zach Wellstood (UC Berkeley): "The phonologization of tonal depression and the emergence of a fourth tone height in Cua (Kalahari Khoe)"
• Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Friday Apr 3 - Dwinelle 5125 and Zoom - 2-3pm
  Panel on "Demystifying the Publication Process," with Eve Nuria Fleisig, Julianne Kapner, and Marguerite Morlan
• Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Friday Apr 10 - Dwinelle 5125 and Zoom - 2-3pm
  Collaborative workshop on "Indexing a Linguist: CVs & Websites"
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Apr 3 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3:10-4:30pm
  Yağmur Kiper (UC Santa Cruz): "Two distinct mechanisms for genitive case assignment across nominalizations"
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Apr 10 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3:10-4:30pm
  Talk by Elise Kim (UC Berkeley)

Upcoming talk: "Inventing Adlam: The Origins and Impact of a New African Writing System"

In the late 1980s, teenage brothers Abdoulaye and Ibrahima Barry created Adlam, a new script to represent the Fula language. Today, Adlam is used by millions of speakers across more than twenty countries, encoded in the Unicode Standard, and supported on major digital platforms.

This panel brings together the inventors alongside scholars Coleman Donaldson (An ka taa) and Anushah Hossain (Script Encoding Initiative) to examine Adlam within broader questions of language politics, digital infrastructure, and the global circulation of new writing systems.

April 17, 2026 | 10am-12pm PT
Social Science Matrix, 820 Social Sciences Building and on Zoom
Full details and online registration

Sponsored by the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures, Letters of the Sahara research project, the Script Encoding Initiative, the Center for African Studies, and the Department of Linguistics

Terry Regier gave a keynote talk at the Workshop on Computational Approaches to Linguistic Typology and Multilingual NLP (SIGTYP 2026) in Rabat, Morocco (remotely, alas), on March 29.

Darya Kavitskaya will be giving a colloquium talk at MIT, titled "Vowel harmony domains in Turkic and Uralic: There and back again," on April 3.