Historical and Areal Linguistics

UC Berkeley linguistics department offers couse on Kalaallisut language

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 class are learning conversational Kalaallisut from Ellen and Grethe who participate from their homes in Denmark via Zoom. Conversation topics so far include introducing oneself and saying where one lives and where one was born. The sounds of Kalaallisut are...

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
...

Kavitskaya publishes in the Journal of Historical Linguistics

September 4, 2023

Darya Kavitskaya published an article with co-author Florian Wandl "On the reconstruction of contrastive secondary palatalization in Common Slavic" in the Journal of Historical Linguistics. Congrats, Dasha!

Publication of first two volumes of Amazonian Languages: An International Handbook

January 31, 2023

The first two volumes of Amazonian languages: An international handbook were officially published on January 30. Edited by Patience Epps and Lev Michael, these two volumes present grammatical descriptions of all reasonably well-attested linguistic isolates of the Greater Amazonian region. Volume I covers Aikanã to Kandozi-Shapra, and Volume II covers Kanoé to Yurakaré. (A chapter in Volume III will summarize what we know about the more poorly-attested isolates and small language families known only from colonial-era materials.)

Linguists currently or formerly affiliated with Berkeley contributed significantly to these volumes:

Introduction (freely available online): Patience Epps (UT Austin) and Lev Michael

Aʔɨwa: Christine Beier and Lev Michael

Cholón: Astrid Alexander-Bakkerus (University of Amsterdam) and Kelsey Caitlyn Neely (Endangered Languages Documentation Programme; Berkeley PhD 2019)

Muniche: Lev Michael, Stephanie Farmer (Berkeley PhD 2015), Greg Finley (Meta, Berkeley PhD 2015), Karina Sullón Acosta (Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos), Christine Beier, Alejandrina Chanchari Icahuate (Munichis, Peru), Donalia Icahuate Baneo (Munichis, Peru), and Melchor Sinti Saita (Munichis, Peru)

Mỹky: Bernat Bardagil (University of Groningen; Berkeley postdoc 2017-2020)

Omurano: Zachary O'Hagan (Berkeley PhD 2020)

Taushiro: Zachary O'Hagan

Warao: Andrés Romero-Figueroa (Universidad Católica Andrés Bello) and Konrad Rybka (University of Leiden; Berkeley postdoc 2015-2018)

In addition, Zachary O'Hagan was the editorial assistant in the first several years of the project.

The next volumes in the series will focus on the small language families of Greater Amazonia, and the final volumes, on the large language families of the region.