UBC electronically hosts Northwest Linguistics Conference
UBC linguistics is hosting (virtually) the 37th annual Northwest Linguistics Conference this weekend, from May 14–16, 2021! Plenary speakers include Dr. Miikka Silfverberg, Dr. Neda Todorović, and Samuel Akinbo.
Nicolai and Lo win international pronunciation prediction competition
Garrett Nicolai and Roger Lo have won the SIGMORPHON Shared Task on Grapheme-to-Phoneme Conversion for low-resource languages. The challenge was to develop a computational system that predicts the pronunciation of words from their spelling. Their submission trained on Adyghe, Greek, Icelandic, Italian, Khmer, Latvian, Maltese, Romanian, Slovene, and Welsh.
Oksana and Muhammad’s research featured in Pithy Papers
Language Sciences has organized Pithy Papers, a series of brief descriptions of UBC Language Sciences recent research. The inaugural installment features work by Oksana Tkachman on conventionalization in sign languages and by Muhammad Abdul-Mageed on ‘micro-dialects’.
Bryan Gick named AAAS Fellow
Bryan Gick has been named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) for distinguished contributions to the field of experimental phonetics, notably for advances in multimodal perception and biomechanics. Congratulations, Bryan!
New course on the languages of Africa
The department is offering a new survey course, LING 308: Languages of Africa. Students will study African languages and cultures from the ground up, including through inquisitive exploration in language projects.
Three grad students recognized as UBC Public Scholars
Three grad students have been recognized as UBC Public Scholars. The Public Scholars Initiative supports doctoral students “make purposeful contributions to the public good through collaborative, action-oriented, and/or creative forms of scholarship.” They are Anne Bertrand, Roger Yu-Hsiang Lo, and Michael Schwan. Congratulations all around!
Two students win Edna Dharmaratne Award
Two students have been honored with the Edna Dharmaratne Award: Nicole Ebbutt, an undergrad in speech sciences, and Ife Adebara, a Ph.D. student in linguistics. Congratulations to both!
Samuel Akinbo on talking drums
Linguistics grad student Samuel Akinbo’s research on ‘talking drums’ is profiled in an interesting and entertainingly pun-filled discussion on the Language Sciences site. The crucial observation is that the gángan, a drum used in Nigeria, can convey a rich array of linguistic information about spoken Yorùbá.
How about learning some Swahili?
The Linguistics Department is offering a Swahili language course in Winter 2020 Term 2. The course code is ASTU 204T. The course is an introduction to the essentials of Swahili sound systems, vocabulary, expressions, grammar and cultural life. There will be a focus on listening, reading, speaking and writing. There are no prerequisites for this […]
Coronavirus phonetics cookbook
As a way to boost morale during isolation, the LING 314 (Instrumental Phonetics) class had an online potluck party, but, as they couldn’t actually share food, they shared recipes. The result was a coronavirus cookbook available to all.