Language and Social Context

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...

Berkeley linguists at NWAV 51

September 14, 2023

Congrats to the current and recent Berkeley linguists who will be presenting at New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV) 51, taking place at Queens College, CUNY from October 13 to 15:

Julianne Kapner: "Ne-omission in Ivorian French celebrity interviews on YouTube" Chaya R. Nove: "Linguistic innovation or ancestral feature? The case of tsuzamen and tsam in Hasidic Yiddish" Noah Macey, Michael Stern, Sang-Im Lee-Kim, Jason Shaw: "A dynamic neural model of the interaction between social and lexical influences on speech production: the case of retroflex sibilants in Taiwan Mandarin" Cooper Bedin, Lal Zimman, Marina Zhukova: "Operationalizing gender: Methods for statistical modeling of open-response demographic data" Nicole Rosen, Alexandra Pfiffner: "A culture of labour: indexing ‘blue-collar’ through a lower /s/ COG in Manitoba, Canada" Eve Fleisig: "Hedges and apologies in ChatGPT responses to African-American English and Mainstream U.S. English" Baichen Du, Alexandra Pfiffner, Keith Johnson: "Visible articulatory variation as a cue to sound change: Lip rounding and lip protrusion variability in the Mandarin sibilant merger" Irene Yi, Grace Wong: "Social Perception and Categorization of Southern Mandarin Accents" Grace Wong, Irene Yi: "Social attribute ratings of Mandarin varieties in different countries" Naitian Zhou: "Artificial accents: assessing phonological variation in voice cloning software" Aurora Martinez Kane: "Social perceptions of Traditional New Mexican Spanish paragoge across communities" Dakota Robinson: "Sociophonetic variation in Breton: Analyzing the effects of social factors, language contact, and speaker attitudes" Anton de la Fuente, Julia Peck: "Variable enregisterment and variable stigma: Shifting indexes of locality in Galician" Riley VanMeter: "Quantifying grammaticalization via translation: The position of Lo Cunto de li Cunti’s Neapolitan on the Romance grammaticalization cline"

Licata accepts postdoc at UC Riverside

April 13, 2023

Starting in July, Gabriella Licata (Spanish & Portuguese) will be a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Latino and Latin American Research and Studies Center at the University of California, Riverside. She will be working at the intersection of linguistics, education, and anthropology in the LatCrit Sociocultural Linguistics Lab under the supervision of Dr. Claudia Holguín Mendoza.

Language as Social Justice Working Group conference on raciolinguistic ideologies

March 23, 2023

Calques is happy to pass on this message from Gabriella Licata:

The Language as Social Justice Working Group (Berkeley Language Center) is hosting a free virtual conference April 6-7 titled "Visibilizing raciolinguistic ideologies across cultures, languages, and systems." Our keynote speakers are Clara Vaz Bauler (Adelphi University) and Ian Cushing (Edge Hill University). You can see program information and register here on our conference site.

Bleaman, Cugno, and Helms publish in LVC

January 25, 2023

Congratulations to Isaac Bleaman, Katie Cugno (SF State), and Annie Helms on the publication of their article "Medium-shifting and intraspeaker variation in conversational interviews" in Language Variation and Change! The article is available in Open Access here.

Peck featured in California Magazine

January 18, 2023

Julia Peck was featured in an article on Ladino language revitalization in California Magazine, a publication of the Cal Alumni Association. Check it out here!

Davidson receives UC Multicampus Research Initiative Grant

January 16, 2023

Justin Davidson and Hispanic Linguists from UCLA and UC Santa Cruz were awarded a UC Multicampus Research Initiative Grant! The project, entitled "An interdisciplinary approach to the study of Spanish-English bilingualism in California," lasts for at least two years and expands Professor Davidson's Corpus of Bay Area Spanish to now include Spanish-English bilinguals across all of California. Read more about the grant here!

Galvano publishes in Language and Speech

January 9, 2023

Congratulations to Amber Galvano and co-authors Nicholas Henriksen and Shayna Greenley on the publication of their article "Sociophonetic Investigation of the Spanish Alveolar Trill /r/ in Two Canonical-Trill Varieties" in the journal Language and Speech.

Bleaman and Nove speak at AJS

December 7, 2022

Isaac Bleaman and Chaya Nove will be giving a research talk at the 54th annual meeting of the Association for Jewish Studies, held in Boston, December 18-20. Their talk is titled "The Corpus of Spoken Yiddish in Europe: A new resource for language research and pedagogy," and it is part of a panel on "Jewish Corpus Linguistics and Language Documentation."