Recent News
This spring was a successful graduation season for UW linguists! The department awarded 35 Bachelor of Arts degrees, 10 Master of Science degrees, 1 Master of Arts degree, and 4 Doctor of Philosophy degrees. Four additional PhD candidates will graduate at the end of summer quarter in August, and two students were granted PhD candidacy in the spring.
A major highlight of UW Commencement was Bachelor of Arts recipient Peji Hota Wakhan carrying the banner for the College of Arts and Sciences... Read more
The UW Department of Linguistics is thrilled to announce that a new member of the faculty will be joining us starting in Autumn 2019. Shane Steinert-Threlkeld is currently a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Institute for Logic, Language, and Computation in Amsterdam, where he has worked since receiving his Ph.D. from Stanford in 2017. His research uses computational methods to address questions that arise in theoretical linguistics, largely concerning why natural languages are structured as they... Read more
Are you thinking about taking a summer course? Summer is beautiful on campus, and generally a little calmer than during the academic year.
Three popular linguistics courses will be offered this summer: LING 269, Swearing and Taboo Language, LING 233, Introduction to Language and Society, and LING 234, Language and Diversity. Take 269 if you're interested in learning more about why humans use taboo language, and about the... Read more
Linguistics and AIS Undergraduate Peji Hota Wakhan (Christian Nault) has been named to the 2019 Husky 100 list, an annual honor that recognizes students who are "making the most of their time at the UW." You can find his profile on the Husky 100 website here. Peji is a graduating senior, studying the Dakota and Tlingit languages, while also dabbling in French, German, and Japanese. He is a double major in linguistics... Read more
The UW Department of Linguistics is thrilled to announce that Naja Ferjan Ramirez will be joining the faculty starting in Autumn 2019. Naja comes to us from the UW Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences, where she was first a Post-Doctoral Fellow and then a Research Scientist. Naja received her Ph.D. in Linguistics and Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego in 2013. She studies language learning in the first five years of life, with a focus on children of diverse... Read more
Department faculty and friends and colleagues of Akira Omaki gathered on the afternoon of Friday, March 8 to celebrate the legacy of Dr. Omaki. Speakers included Dr. Colin Phillips of the University of Maryland, Dr. Bonnie Nozari of Johns Hopkins University, Dr. Brian Dillon of of UMass Amherst, and Dr. Emily Atkinson of the University of Michigan. Department Chair Richard Wright also announced a campus memorial for Dr. Omaki comprising a bench and a ginkgo tree. Both will be located on... Read more
Professor Sharon Hargus taught a field methods course during Autumn Quarter focused on documentation of the Tigrinya language. Tigrinya is a Semitic language, spoken in Ethiopia and Eritrea. Working with native speaker Seium Habties, originally from Eritrea, Professor Hargus and four graduate students spent many hours each week on the standard language documentation topics of grammar, texts and lexicon. This course offered a very unique opportunity to students Jiahui Huang and Ted Kye of... Read more
The Department of Linguistics is proud to have co-sponsored Professor Joseph C. Hill's lecture "Emerging Trends in the Study of Black ASL: History, Structure, and People" at the University of Washington on March 13, 2019. Dr. Hill is an Assistant Professor in the Department of American Sign Language and Interpreting Education at the National Technical Institutes for the Deaf, and gave this talk as part of the UW Graduate School Public Lecture... Read more
Five sociolinguists represented our department in October at the 47th New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV) conference at New York University. Attendees included Professor Alicia Wassink, and Ph.D. students Nicole Chartier, Kirby Conrod, Ben Jones, and Rob Squizzero.
Nicole Chartier and Ben Jones presented a poster called "Six Views of New England: Mapping Perceptions of New England Speech." Kirby Conrod gave a talk called "Pronouns and Misgendering... Read more
It's time to register for Winter Quarter courses! Are you interested in learning about why people swear and what rules govern taboo language? Perhaps you're curious about sign languages. Or maybe you're interested in multilingualism and language contact? Consider LING 269 (Swearing and Taboo Language), LING 403 (Linguistics of Signed Languages), or LING 234 (Language and Diversity). None of these courses have prerequisites!
If you've... Read more