Language and Social Context

Carr and Morlan speak on linguistic landscape

November 16, 2022

Jhonni Carr and Marguerite Morlan presented their research at I Congreso internacional sobre Paisaje Lingüístico: El entorno urbano y rural hispánico (1st International Conference on Linguistic Landscape: Hispanic urban and rural environments). Jhonni's talk was titled "Come work from Mexico, it’s truly magical: la gentrificación en el paisaje lingüístico de Mazunte," and Marguerite's was "Language choice and identity in the transgressive linguistic landscape of Catalonia."

Congrats to Dr. Eric Wilbanks!

November 1, 2022

Congratulations to Eric Wilbanks, whose doctoral dissertation, "The Integration of Social and Acoustic Cues During Speech Perception," was signed, sealed, and delivered last week!

Berkeley linguists @ NWAV 50

September 28, 2022

The following Berkeley linguists will be presenting their research at the 50th annual conference New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV), taking place October 13-15, 2022 in downtown San Jose and hosted by Stanford Linguistics. The full program is available here.

Isaac L. Bleaman and Rhea Kommerell: "Detecting the envelope of variation using computational language models" Aurora Martinez Kane: "Linguistic and social factors influencing variation in Traditional New Mexican Spanish paragoge" Gabriella Licata: "From implicit to explicit bias: Assessing generational attitude changes towards US Spanish translanguaging repertoires"

SLab meetings and readings in fall 2022

August 31, 2022

Calques is sharing the following announcement from Amber Galvano, one of the co-organizers of the Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley:

Our first SLaB meeting will be Monday, September 12th, 2-3pm, in 5125 Dwinelle (Spanish & Portuguese Library) and on Zoom. The deadline to vote here on this semester's readings, the first of which will be discussed on the 12th, is next Wednesday, September 7th.

Bleaman receives NSF CAREER Award

August 16, 2022

Congratulations to Isaac Bleaman, who has received a 5-year CAREER grant from the National Science Foundation! His project is entitled "Documenting and Analyzing Sociolinguistic Variation in the Speech of Holocaust Survivors," and it will involve developing a large corpus of conversational Yiddish for language research and community engagement. The project was described in a recent announcement to LSA members and publicized in the Forward (first in Yiddish and then in English translation).

FForum 2020-2021

Fall 2020 Schedule 2020.09.02 Welcome back!

Join us via Zoom for the first FForum meeting of the semester, where we will catch up on summer developments. All are welcome!

2020.09.09 Christine Beier and Lev Michael (UC Berkeley)

Mobile tonal melodies in Iquito: analysis, elicitation, and texts

This talk focuses on the analysis of mobile tonal melodies in Iquito and methodological issues that we faced in developing this analysis. Iquito mobile melodies are tonal melodies whose position is affected by the presence of...

Lev Michael

Professor of Linguistics

PhD, UT Austin

Anthropological linguistics, typology, documentation and description of Amazonian languages, South American historical and contact linguistics, language revitalization

Isaac L. Bleaman

Assistant Professor of Linguistics

PhD, NYU

Sociolinguistics, language variation and change, sociophonetics, sociosyntax, corpus methods, language contact, multilingualism, language planning, language and ethnicity, Yiddish, Jewish language varieties

Yiddish Linguistics

Isaac L. Bleaman
2020

Linguistic studies of Yiddish span several centuries and incorporate a wide range of research questions and methodologies, from philological analyses of Old Yiddish texts to generative approaches to particular grammatical constructions. The historical development of the language has undoubtedly been, and continues to be, the most hotly debated research topic in Yiddish linguistics. However, other productive areas of inquiry have included structural analysis (e.g., syntax, semantics, and phonology), dialectology and other fields of sociolinguistics (e.g., language contact and interspeaker...

Implicit Standardization in a Minority Language Community: Real-Time Syntactic Change among Hasidic Yiddish Writers

Isaac L. Bleaman
2020

The recent turn to "big data" from social media corpora has enabled sociolinguists to investigate patterns of language variation and change at unprecedented scales. However, research in this paradigm has been slow to address variable phenomena in minority languages, where data scarcity and the absence of computational tools (e.g., taggers, parsers) often present significant barriers to entry. This article analyzes socio-syntactic variation in one minority language variety, Hasidic Yiddish, focusing on a variable for which tokens can be identified in raw text using purely morphological...