Media articles that report on achievements or publications from our faculty and staff, as well as media articles written by departmentmental members.
Claire Bowern and lab members (including Juhyae Kim and Sam Lopez) have been working with Toby Adams and Kullilli community members of language support. They have been writing language lessons and working on the Kullilli dictionary. This work was recently featured in an article written by Maddelin McCosker for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s news.
The Histling Lab, led by Prof. Claire Bowern, has partnered with members of the Kullilli community in Australia to release a language app. The app is a first Kullilli dictionary and is available for iOS and Android.
Jeremy Johns is recently interviewed by the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity & Transnational Migration, as a RITM Graduate Fellow.
As described by the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity & Transnational Migration, in order to attract the best graduate students to Yale and to support their work, the Center designates a select number of incoming doctoral students annually as RITM Graduate Fellows. These Fellows are nominated by their departments upon admission and are selected by an RITM committee.
Prof. Maria Piñango was profiled as a part of “Firsts and Founders in the FAS: A Series in Celebration of 50WomenAtYale150” as the first woman and the first person of color to receive tenure in the Linguistics Department. Her profile was written by PhD Candidate Sarah Babinski and can be found here.
Claire Bowern was a panelist recently discussing remote fieldwork, community support, and ethics, as part of the University of Melbourne’s “Linguistics in the Pub” series. Approximately 100 participants from all over the world got together to listen to reflections about Covid-19 based changes to field practices, what linguists can do to most effectively support the communities they work with, and the additional ethical challenges that arise when working remotely. The panelists discussed a range of field situations.
Linguistics faculty member Claire Bowern recently appeared on the linguistics podcast “Distributed Morphs.” The podcast is aimed at linguistics undergraduate and graduate students and discusses different aspects of morphology. Claire talked about morphology and language change, along with rapid (and not so rapid) change in the verb morphology of Bardi, an Indigenous Australian language from northern Australia.
Yale will offer two undergraduate courses next semester in American Sign Language — the first to be offered for course credit.
The Yale Herald reports on a recent comedy show at Yale by D.J. Demers. Demers is hard of hearing and incorporates jokes about his experiences growing up and wearing hearing aids. On his website, Demers describes the tour as “a cross-country road trip to shatter stigmas and raise awareness about hearing loss through the power of laughter.” Disability Empowerment for Yale (DEFY), founded in 2016, helped bring Demers to Yale’s campus as part of a larger move to give more visibility for Yale’s disabled community.
Noah Macey (Linguistics ‘09) reports on a new pilot American Sign Language (ASL) program at Yale, with courses taught by Jessica Tanner. The pilot program begins in the spring, when the university will offer two ASL classes through the Linguistics Department, which petitioned the Language Study Committee last spring for the course’s approval.
Claire Bowern adds an article on the origins of Pama-Nyungan to The Conversation.
A lesson by Claire Bowern on the basics of historical linguistics and the origins of the English language has been turned into a TedEd animation. Watch and listen to the animation to see English has evolved through generations of speakers. (Director: Patrick Smith; Narrator: Addison Anderson.)
Katie Martin (Yale ‘18) published a Slate article called “How ‘Sounding White’ Helps Get You Ahead—on Film and in Real Life”. The piece is about linguistic prejudice and also talks a little bit about the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project, which Katie contributed to.
Emily Finn (Yale ‘09) published a NYTimes article called “How I learned to stop worrying and love linguistics”.
Historical Linguist Claire Bowern was one of the contributing experts on WNYC’s postcast RadioLab, in their “Asking for a Friend” segment. She, along with Wilbur Cross Medalist and Yale Alum Sally Thomason, answered questions about how far back in time one can go to find a word that is unchanged, that would be understandable to people far in the past.
Yale’s Linguistics Department, in conjunction with Yale’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Office of Student Development and Diversity (OGSDD) hosted a free webinar for prospective graduate students. Students and faculty from the department discussed the admissions process, life in the department, research opportunities, and living in New Haven. The webinar was recorded and is now available for later viewing here.
The award “honors faculty members at Convocation for their exemplary qualities as mentors.”
As a Presidential Visiting Fellow, Stephanie has spent the past year at Yale teaching the Mohegan language and raising interest in language revitalization.
The ASL pilot program proves to be a resounding success as all spots in Jessica Tanner’s introductory-level course are filled.
Incoming Lecturer Stephanie Fielding discussed the extinction and rebirth of the Mohegan language in an interview with Connecticut Public Radio.
Joint work by Professor Claire Bowern on the geographical distribution of Australian languages was featured in The Conversation.
Professor Claire Bowern spoke to science enthusiasts at the Tilde Cafe about the historical study of language.
The crossword puzzle that appears in today’s New York Times is the creation of senior linguistics major Tom McCoy, a member of the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project.
Their paper, ”Phylogenetic approach to the evolution of color term systems,” was also featured in this week’s YaleNews.
She is one of several authors on an article in Nature about the genomic history of Aboriginal Australia, and her contributions to that paper were profiled in Science.
Earlier this month Professor Steve Anderson gave a public lecture titled “The Place of Human Language in the Animal World“ to inaugurate the new “Language and Communication” Research Network at the University of Geneva.
YGDP was featured in articles in the Boston Globe, the Columbus Dispatch, and on Slate’s Lexicon Valley blog.
