Language and Social Context

Linguistics events this week (Sept 4-11, 2026)

September 3, 2026

In and around the Department of Linguistics in the next week:

Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Friday Sept 4 - Dwinelle 5125 and Zoom - 2-3pm
Round table: Research over summer, introductions Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Sept 4 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3:10-4:30pm
Round robin FForum - Wednesday Sept 9 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4pm Round robin catch-up of summer fieldwork and research. All are welcome! Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Sep 11 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3:10-4:30pm
Amy Rose Deal and Kang Franco Liu (UC Berkeley): Donkeys, bishops, and the distinction between weak and strong definites

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...

You had to be there: The Pragmatics of Improvisational Joking in Relation to a Sociolinguistic Theory of Conversation

Catherine Davies
1986

Sexuality, gender, and the voice in (Bay Area) English

Amber Galvano
2026

The acoustic signal is the carrier of not only linguistic (as in, what the interlocutor intends to communicate) but also socio-cultural meaning (as in, who a speaker-listener is). The feld of sociophonetics hinges on the inextricability of these two facets of speech sounds. It has been established that speakers can both intentionally and unintentionally communicate aspects of social identity, including gender and sexuality, in the subtle distinctions present in their production of sounds in a given language system. In turn, listeners may draw upon the biases engendered by previous...

QP fest 2018!

November 22, 2018

QP Fest will be held on Monday, November 26, in Dwinelle 370, from 3-5pm. (Note the rescheduled date!)

The schedule is as follows:

Introduction (3:10-3:15) Tessa Scott: "Conjoint/disjoint in Ndengeleko: A head movement alternation" (3:15-3:35) Karee Garvin: "Positional effects on timing and coordination of segments within the syllable" (3:35-3:55) Yevgeniy Melguy: "Talker ethnicity and listener expectation in the perception of foreign-accented speech" (3:55-4:15) Mini-break (4:15-4:20) Noah Hermalin: "Ambiguity and efficiency trade-offs in Sumerian cuneiform" (4:20-4:40) Myriam Lapierre: "A phonological analysis of Panãra" (4:40-5:00)

Bleaman speaks at UCLA

January 29, 2025

Congratulations to Isaac Bleaman, who will be giving an invited research talk titled "Holocaust Testimonies in Yiddish Language Research and Pedagogy" at the UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies on February 24. More info is available here.

Whitmore speaks at MLA

January 21, 2025

Oliver Whitmore (French) presented a talk at the 2025 Modern Language Association (MLA) Convention, held in New Orleans from January 9-12, titled "Disputing Diglossia: When a sociolinguist doesn't see language."

Holliday publishes in Linguistics Vanguard

January 21, 2025

Congratulations to Nicole Holliday on her new article, "My Memoji, my self: Prosodic correlates of online performed code-switching via avatar," published in Linguistics Vanguard!

Holliday quoted in the Guardian

November 21, 2024

Nicole Holliday is quoted in an article on ‘Government by the worst’: why people are calling Trump’s new sidekicks a ‘kakistocracy’ in the Guardian. From the article: “Americans, Holliday says, love labels. “We like having words for things, because then they seem like they’ve been...

Berkeley linguists at NWAV

October 31, 2024

There will be six talks by Berkeley linguists at NWAV 52 in Miami, November 7-9, 2024:

Amber Galvano: "Measuring Sibilants in Speech & Sexuality Research: Beyond Spectral Moments" Anna Knall: "Gender Assignment Variation in Spanish-English Mixed Noun Phrases" Nicole Holliday: “'I Don’t Like My Conversations Being Judged By an AI'”: Issues of Bias and Quality in Social Feedback Speech Technology" Julia Peck: "Multilingualism and Gender Assignment:Three Parallel Systems for Loanwords in Istanbul Judeo-Spanish?" Rhosean Asmah: "Coronal Stop Deletion in Megan Thee Stallion's Rap and Speech" Niko Schwarz: "Phonetics of Liquid Neutralization in Isla Margarita, Venezuela"

Congrats, all!