Welcome!

Welcome to the Berkeley Linguistics Department! With the first linguistics department to be established in North America (in 1901), Berkeley has a rich and distinguished tradition of rigorous linguistic documentation and theoretical innovation, making it an exciting and fulfilling place to carry out linguistic research. Its original mission, due to the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber and the Sanskrit and Dravidian scholar Murray B. Emeneau, was the recording and describing of unwritten languages, especially American Indian languages spoken in California and elsewhere in the United States. The current Department of Linguistics continues this tradition, integrating careful, scholarly documentation with cutting-edge theoretical work in phonetics, phonology and morphology; in syntax and semantics; pragmatics; sociolinguistics and language revitalization; historical linguistics; typology; and cognitive linguistics. Berkeley PhDs tend to be interdisciplinary and creative, benefitting from interactions with distinguished faculty in such other Berkeley departments as anthropology, computer science, philosophy, psychology, and departments devoted to particular languages. The Department emphasizes research that seeks to discover and provide deep explanations for general properties of linguistic form, meaning, and usage.

In the Spotlight

South American Areal Phonology Project

South American languages with retroflex affricates
SA languages with retroflex affricates (in red)
Only in recent decades have linguists systematically taken on the empirical challenge presented by the large number of little-documented and poorly understood languages of South America. Now that high-quality descriptions of these languages are accumulating, major questions are emerging regarding the relationships between these remarkable languages. In general, languages are related to each other in one of two ways: via descent from a common ancestor ('genetically'), as Italian and French are related to each other through shared descent from Latin, or via language contact, in the way that English is related to Norman French through the large number of linguistic features that English acquired from that language in the aftermath of the Norman invasion of England.

The South American Areal Phonology Project aims to identify traces of language contact in the phonologies, or sound systems, of South American languages, both on the smaller language-to-language scale, and on the larger areal scale. Understanding how language contact has affected the phonologies of South American languages is important in two ways. First, the diffusion of linguistic features between languages generally occurs in contexts of intense social interaction between the speakers of the languages involved. This means that identifying traces of phonological diffusion between South American languages gives us insight into the sociocultural history of the region, including inter-cultural contact during the Pre-Colombian period. Second, an understanding of language contact in South America will play a role in linguistic reconstruction by allowing us to identify linguistic features that may be widespread due to language contact, but do not reconstruct to the proto-languages of the continent. The South American Areal Phonology Project is being carried out by Lev Michael, Tammy Stark, Will Chang, Anna Currey, and Elizabeth Pierce.