Historical and Areal Linguistics

Book launch for "Historical and Sociolinguistic Approaches to French"

October 31, 2024

Mairi McLaughlin is co-organizing a book launch on Wednesday, November 6th online from 9-11am Pacific to celebrate the publication of the volume Historical and Sociolinguistic Approaches to French, which she edited with Janice Carruthers and Olivia Walsh. The volume is intended to celebrate the career and many contributions of Wendy Ayres-Bennett so the book launch will include a response to the book by Wendy and some remarks about her career. All are welcome to attend!...

Beguš and Dąbkowski publish in Journal of Linguistics

October 3, 2024

Gašper Beguš and Maksymilian Dąbkowski published a paper on "The blurring history of intervocalic devoicing" in the Journal of Linguistics. The paper proposes a new explanation for an unusual sound change--intervocalic devoicing. The paper is available here: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022226724000197. Congrats!

Hyman and Nichols co-edit volume on language change

September 26, 2024

Larry Hyman and Johanna Nichols, together with several co-editors, have published a volume on "Language change for the worse" with Language Science Press. The full citation is below. Congrats!

Enke, Dankmar W., Hyman, Larry M., Nichols, Johanna, Seiler, Guido, Weber, Thilo & Hölzl, Andreas (eds.). 2024. Language change for the worse. (Studies in Diversity Linguistics 33). Berlin: Language Science Press. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.5116353

UC Berkeley linguistics department offers couse on Kalaallisut language

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‘Welcome!’

This fall the Department of Linguistics at UC Berkeley offers students a unique opportinuty to learn about Kalaallisut, the official language of Greenland. The course is co-taught by Kalaallisut speakers Ellen Thrane and Grethe Schmidt and linguist Line Mikkelsen. The students in the...

Garrett publishes in Diachronica

September 17, 2024
Andrew Garrett has published a short essay, "Four decades in historical linguistics", as part of the continuing "40@40" series in Diachronica. (A prepublication version is here.) Congrats!

Gašper Beguš

Associate Professor of Linguistics

PhD, Harvard

Phonology, phonetics, computational linguistics, historical linguistics, Indo-European

Graduate Field Methods Course History

This page summarizes the history of graduate instruction in linguistic field methods at Berkeley, with information about academic year, language(s), consultant(s), and instructor(s), when known. Links in the Language column are to archival collections in the California Language Archive (CLA). The information has been reconstructed from archival course catalogs, which occasionally do not reflect the ultimate instructor of record, and in consultation with Linguistics faculty, graduate students, alumni, and records in the CLA. We will...

Kavitskaya speaks at UChicago

October 26, 2023

Darya Kavitskaya gave two talks at UChicago this week: a colloquium on Oct 26th on "Functional factors in contrast preservation and loss: Evidence from Slavic” and a talk for Language Variation and Change group on Oct 27th on "Dialects of Crimean Tatar: Fieldwork and its challenges”.

Nichols and Berge present at the International Conference on Historical Linguistics at Heidelberg University.

September 12, 2023

Two (former) Berkeley affiliates presented at the International Conference on Historical Linguistics at Heidelberg University. Johanna Nichols presented on "Reconstructing prehistoric sociolinguistics from modern grammatical evidence" and Anna Berge (PhD 1997, now a professor at the University of
Alaska, Fairbanks) on "Prehistoric climate
...