Announcements

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.

Sóskuthy and Abdul-Mageed receive infrastructure grants

Assistant professors Marci Sóskuthy and Muhammad Abdul-Mageed both received funding to support digital infrastructure through the Canada Foundation for Innovation John R. Evans Leaders Fund. Read more about it here.

Nigel Howard offers ASL classes

Adjunct linguistics professor Nigel Howard, who has become a local celebrity providing American Sign Language interpretation at provincial COVID-19 briefings, will be teaching courses in ASL this fall.

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 […]

Abdul-Mageed in Medium on the language of COVID-19

Muhammad Abdul-Mageed has published a piece in Medium exploring how language use on social media reflects the impact of COVID-19 based on a large 65-language dataset that he and collaborators at UBC constructed.

Graduating students nominated for leadership awards

The Faculty of Arts recognizes a number of graduating students every year for their community leadership. This year, quite a few linguistics and speech sciences students were nominated for leadership awards, including: Angelina Lloy (not pictured) Ariana Hernandez Ashley Chand Christina Sen Felicia Tong Gavina Sian Ian Carpick Juliana Lee Lisa Nguyen Paris Gappmayr (photo […]

Bryan Gick on speaking moistly

The prime minister recently raised eyebrows by referring to ‘speaking moistly’ during a coronavirus press briefing. Bryan Gick discussed what this might mean from a scientific perspective on CBC radio, and participated in this brief Q&A on the topic. It’s not at all dry, in the best possible sense—and, among other things, raises the interesting question […]