Recent News

Graduate student Jessica Luo is the 2024-2025 recipient of the Arienne Dwyer Language Documentation Award, made possible by a fund generously established in 2022 by UW Linguistics affiliate faculty member, Arienne Dwyer. Luo will receive from the fund to assist with dissertation research expenses. Luo’s dissertation, supervised by Myriam Lapierre, is focused on Wu dialects. She plans to spend most of 2025-2026 documenting two under-studied Sanmen dialect and Xinchang dialect of Wu Chinese (wuu… Read more
Congratulations to Trent Ukasick on receiving the 2024 Graduate Research Excellence Award! Here's more about Trent’s research in his own words: "I received the Department Excellence Award for Autumn 2024, which has helped enormously with my research. The award gave me the opportunity to focus full time on writing my dissertation and has allowed me to stay on track for my expected defense in Spring 2025. During the 2023-2024 academic year, I carried out fieldwork in China, where I developed an… Read more
Our students and faculty have been busy during fall quarter! Here are some hightlights:  Ty Gill-Saucier presented a poster ‘A primer into the lexical and phonological origins and roots of Mississippi Gulf Coast French: A study based on Linguistic Atlases at New Ways of Analyzing Variation 52 (NWAV) in Miami Beach, Florida.     Andrew Hedding, together with Michele Yuan from UCLA, presented a talk "Distinct pathways to possessor A’-… Read more
Congratulations to Alicia Beckford Wassink on being elected the Vice President/President-Elect of the Linguistic Society of America. The LSA, established in 1924, is the oldest and most prominent professional association of linguists in the United States, whose mission is to advance the scientific study of language and to disseminate linguistics scholarship for the advancement of knowledge and the betterment of society.   In… Read more
Congratulations to Emily Bender on receiving the Thomas L. and Margo G. Wyckoff Endowed Faculty Fellowship in recognition of her sterling research, institutional and professional leadership, and invaluable public-facing scholarship and advocacy. This fellowship rotates between all four divisions of the College of Arts and Sciences and is reserved for the most distinguished faculty.
Congratulations to I-LABS faculty and Department of Linguistics Adjunct Assistant Professor, Dr. Christina Zhao, a finalist for the prestigious 2024 NOMIS & Science Young Explorer Award. Christina Zhao received an undergraduate degree from Pacific Lutheran University and a PhD from the University of Washington. After completing her postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences at the University of Washington, she started her laboratory there in… Read more
On November 8–9, 2024, the 4th Sound Systems of Latin America conference was held at the University of Washington campus. The event gathered 54 participants and featured 23 presentations, along with plenary talks by guest speakers Gabriel Gallinate and Professor Gabriela Caballero. Covering topics ranging from phonetics and phonology to morphosyntax, discourse analysis, field research methods, and indigenous cultures, the conference highlighted a diverse array of languages and language families… Read more
The Department of Linguistics had a couple of booths at the DeafNation Expo in Seattle on Saturday, October 19th.  The ASL program gave away used ASL and Deaf culture books that were given to our program.  We also gave away a hundred ASL program brochures and husky stickers.  We met so many people, high school ASL students and teachers who asked about our program.  It was a great networking experience and sharing awareness with the Deaf community.  All of our ASL… Read more
UW Linguistics will once again be hosting students participating in the North American Computational Linguistics Open (NACLO) competition in 2025! NACLO is an international competition where middle and high school students solve linguistics puzzles. No prior knowledge of linguistics or languages in necessary to solve the problems - just logic skills. The UW Linguistics department will be organizing the competition for the Seattle and Puget Sound Region. Both the open and the invitational… Read more
We are happy to announce our upcoming fall colloquium series! There are three talks scheduled for this quarter. All of our meetings will be held in Mary Gates Hall Room 231. All talks are scheduled at 3:30 pm and refreshments will be provided after the talk. See below for more information including speakers and dates: November 1st: Rachel Bristol (UW Information School): "Negotiating Knowledge Through Conversation"   Talk abstract:… Read more