Fieldwork and Language Documentation

Bleaman receives NSF CAREER Award

August 16, 2022

Congratulations to Isaac Bleaman, who has received a 5-year CAREER grant from the National Science Foundation! His project is entitled "Documenting and Analyzing Sociolinguistic Variation in the Speech of Holocaust Survivors," and it will involve developing a large corpus of conversational Yiddish for language research and community engagement. The project was described in a recent announcement to LSA members and publicized in the Forward (first in Yiddish and then in English translation).

FForum 2020-2021

Fall 2020 Schedule 2020.09.02 Welcome back!

Join us via Zoom for the first FForum meeting of the semester, where we will catch up on summer developments. All are welcome!

2020.09.09 Christine Beier and Lev Michael (UC Berkeley)

Mobile tonal melodies in Iquito: analysis, elicitation, and texts

This talk focuses on the analysis of mobile tonal melodies in Iquito and methodological issues that we faced in developing this analysis. Iquito mobile melodies are tonal melodies whose position is affected by the presence of...

Hannah Sande

Assistant Professor of Linguistics

PhD, UC Berkeley

Phonology, morphology, and their interface; prosody; language documentation and description; African languages, especially languages of Côte d'Ivoire

Lev Michael

Professor of Linguistics

PhD, UT Austin

Anthropological linguistics, typology, documentation and description of Amazonian languages, South American historical and contact linguistics, language revitalization

CLA updates

May 8, 2022

Here's the latest from the California Language Archive:

Thanks to Ronald Sprouse, we have a new website with a new look! Much of the content remains the same, but there's a new blog, project spotlights, and collection spotlights. The first posts are by Andrew Garrett; graduate students Rebecca Jarvis and Katherine Russell, and their collaborator Timothée Kouadio; and Zachary O'Hagan. We'll be inviting others to contribute in the future. Our catalog and the pre-archive continue to function as before. Stay tuned for more new content in the coming months!

Talwani selected as SURF L&S Fellow

March 30, 2022

Jasper Talwani (class of 2023) was just selected as a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellow. This grant awards $5,000 for his proposed 8-week summer research project that will describe and analyze valency-changing suffixes in Highland Chontal, a language isolate of Oaxaca, Mexico, including a language revitalization workshop with Chontal collaborators in Santa María Zapotitlán. These funds will go to research expenses including equipment for community auto-documentation projects and the production and printing of pedagogical materials. He will produce his senior thesis on the basis of this collaborative research.

CLA updates

March 27, 2022

Here's the latest from the California Language Archive:

Madeline Bossi has archived 51 new file bundles of recordings and notes from elicitation sessions on Kipsigis (Southern Nilotic; Kenya) with speakers Linus Kipkoech, Victor Mutai, and Kiplangat Yegon. See file bundles 2019-26.102 through 2019-26.152 here. The work dates from June 2021 through March 2022, and the bundles include useful descriptive titles (e.g., "Grammatical elicitation: Converbial phrases and complementation") and descriptions.

CLA updates

March 14, 2022

Here's the latest from the California Language Archive:

Hannah Sande, with the assistance of Julianne Kapner, has added 63 file bundles of audio and video recordings of elicitation, texts, and other activities related to work with speakers of Guébie (Kru; Côte d'Ivoire). The new bundles -- see 2014-15.081 through 2014-15.144 -- stem from in-person and virtual fieldwork done in 2018 and 2019, and also include other activities such as translation.

dos Santos presents at SSILA

January 26, 2022

Wesley dos Santos presented at the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas (SSILA) last Sunday, January 23. The slides for his talk, "For a Realis and Irrealis Account of Ko and Po in Kawahíva," are available here.

CLA updates

January 16, 2022

Here's the latest from the California Language Archive:

Anna Lewington has archived two cassettes of sound recordings of stories, songs, and music in Matsigenka (Arawak; Peru), from fieldwork conducted for her (1985) MA thesis "The Implications of Manioc Cultivation in the Culture and Mythology of the Machiguenga of South Eastern Peru" (St. Andrews). Justin Spence (PhD 2013) has added over 220 new file bundles to the collection Materials of the Hupa Language Documentation Project (see items 821-1044, from 2009-2010; and 1484-1497, from October to December 2021). The materials stem from a longtime collaboration with speaker Verdena Parker. See Calques from October 8, 2021 for more details!