Language and Social Context

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!

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!...

McLaughlin presents at Language Contact in Translation workshop

October 10, 2024
Mairi McLaughlin is giving a paper called News as a Site of Language Contact from the Early-Modern Period to the Contemporary at a workshop on Language Contact in Translation on 17-18 October in Germersheim, Germany. The...

Bleaman and Kommerell publish in Linguistics Vanguard

September 25, 2024

Isaac Bleaman and Rhea Kommerell ('24) published their article "A computational approach to detecting the envelope of variation" in Linguistics Vanguard. Congrats!

Bleaman gives colloquium talk at Brown

September 16, 2024
Isaac Bleaman will be giving a colloquium talk for the Program in Linguistics at Brown University on Thursday, September 26. The title of his talk is "Social dimensions of variation in Yiddish: Historical perspectives and new insights."

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...