Fieldwork and Language Documentation

The 2018-2019 colloquium series continues this coming Monday, April 22, with a talk by Lenore Grenoble (Chicago). Same time as always, same place as always: 3:10-5 p.m., 370 Dwinelle Hall. The talk is entitled Documenting Contact and Change in Siberian Multilingual Contexts, and the abstract is as follows:

Multiple indigenous languages in Eurasia are undergoing change and loss as speakers shift to Russian. The language ecologies of the Sakha Republic (Yakutia) provide an excellent testing ground for hypotheses about the causes and effects of contact-induced language change. The Sakha language (Turkic) is spoken by a (slim) majority of residents of the Republic, with an estimated 500,000 speakers; several minority indigenous languages are spoken as well. All are undergoing language shift, to varying degrees. Russian, although not the language of the ethnic majority in Sakha, is pervasive with its status as a national language, and as the language of higher education and media. Although we might predict that the use of Sakha supports use of areal features, but that does not appear to be the case today. In this talk I discuss a large, ongoing project that uses mixed methods to document contact and change. Here I focus on the use of experimental methods, with particular attention to word order several Altaic languages: Sakha (Turkic) and Even and Evenki (Tungusic). All three languages show changes from inherited patterns to more Russian-like morphosyntax, including a shift from SOV word order to SVO and word order driven by information structure and changes in clause-combining strategies, as well as some evidence of contact effects in the varieties of Russian used by Sakha speakers. Preliminary work suggests that these changes take place sporadically in the speech of of Even and Evenki speakers, and that language shift probably impedes them from becoming grammaticalized. This hypothesis needs more systematic testing with a combination of experimental and sociolinguistic field data. More research is also needed to see if the innovations are diffusing across speakers of Sakha and whether these changes are indicative of imperfect learning and language shift rather than contact-induced convergence.

Zach O'Hagan writes with the following news from the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages:

Wesley dos Santos archived audio recordings of 16 stories in Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau and Karipuna (Tupí-Guaraní; Brazil), based on fieldwork in 2017 and 2018. Three stories come with additional video recordings, like this one, "The Alligator Who Wanted to Eat a Monkey." In collaboration with the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), we digitized a circa 1946 home film belonging to Mary R. Haas, founding member of our department and first director of the Survey. The film was recorded at 1435 Arch St., Berkeley, and in downtown, and includes Prof. Haas's husband Heng Subhanka. There's footage of tea, laundry-hanging, and flower-watering in the back yard, a meal in the dining room, dish-washing in the kitchen, a warm hearth, shots of downtown Berkeley at night, and an adorable cat! Amalia Skilton's dissertation defense from March 22 is available to be listened to, with accompanying slides, video clip, and still image. We hope to record and make accessible more defenses in the future! William Sturtevant's (BA 1949, Berkeley) 1951 recordings of Creek-Seminole (Muskogean; Oklahoma, Florida) have been made unrestricted. Scans of several documents have been made public recently, many about Yuki (Yuki-Wappo; California): Notes on Yuki Grammar (Silver, 1967); Notes on Yuki Vocabulary and Grammar (Sawyer, 1967); Phonological Distinctions in Yuki (Sawyer, n/d); Spanish loanwords in Yuki (Sawyer, n/d); The Ghost Dance among the Yuki (Sawyer, c1975); Is Yuki a Tone Language? (Oswalt, 1978); Notes on the Yukian Pronominal System (anonymous); Nez Perce wordlist (Aoki, 1960-1961); and Chinook Jargon class handouts (Kaufman, 1966).

Last weekend was a busy one for Berkeley linguists, with department members at conferences in Dwinelle Hall dedicated to Celtic and Amazonian languages as well as attending conferences in other locations!

Numerous Berkeley attendees at the Symposium on Amazonian Languages (SAL III)

Virginia Dawson and Samantha Wathugala at Formal Approaches to South Asian Languages 9, Reed College, Portland (after presenting their paper, In support of a choice functional analysis of Sinhala ðə)

And to cap things off with some true linguistics in action: here's Susan Lin presenting Linguistics: making sense from noise at the East Bay Science Cafe, last Thursday (March 14).

Zach O'Hagan writes with the following news from the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages:

Nicholas Rolle (PhD 2018) archived 28 file bundles of sound recordings and field notes in two collections related to Izon and Kalabari (Ijaw; Nigeria), based on fieldwork in Port Harcourt in July and August 2017. A focus of these elicitation sessions is tone, especially grammatical tone. Now a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Program in Linguistics at Princeton University, Dr. Rolle's recent dissertation, Grammatical Tone: Typology and Theory, can be found here. An accomplished Africanist, NikRo is also a budding Amazonianist, having collaborated with Marine Vuillermet, a postdoc in this department in 2013 and currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Laboratoire Dynamique du Langage (Lyon), on the morphologically conditioned assignment of accent in Ese Ejja (Takanan; Peru, Bolivia). William Sturtevant's (BA 1949, Berkeley) 1951 recordings of Mikasuki (Muskogean; Florida) have been made unrestricted.