Recent News

The Graduate Student Research Community group, “Rethinking Resistance: Art, Performance, and Translocal Imagination” has been awarded a $5,000 Graduate Student Research Community Grant from the Office of International Education at the University at Buffalo. The project is coordinated by Rezvan Shabannejadian (Theatre and Dance) and Mahdiyeh Govah (Global Gender and Sexuality Studies). Alongside them, three additional members, including Reihaneh Hosseini (Linguistics) are participating in the project. This initiative explores visual and performance art from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and its diasporas, focusing on expressions of resistance that go beyond oppositional narratives. We’ll engage with diverse artists and media and organize two scholarly talks to encourage interdisciplinary conversation and collaboration.

PHUNY 2 will take place at the University at Buffalo (North Campus) on Saturday, May 3rd.  This workshop is intended for graduate students in all parts of Upstate NY working on any aspect of phonetics and/or phonology. It is a small and friendly workshop with a single-stream, one-day format. In addition to discussing research, our goal is to build community and provide a venue for practicing conference skills.

The Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) awards $1 million to UB researchers to use AI to integrate multiple data sources and develop statistical and computational methods for extracting knowledge and analyze social determinants of health. The PI is Distinguished Professor Marianthi Markatou (Department of Biostatistics), and it involves co-Ivestigators  from multiple units: Jeff Good (Linguistics), Oliver Kennedy (Computer Science and Engineering), Andrew Talal (School of Medicine and Biological Sciences), Albert Vexler (Biostatistcs).

Dr. Camacho-Rios has been awarded funding from the National Science Foundation for her  project "Documenting directional systems of morphologically complex South Bolivian Quechua varieties in contact with Aymara".  This research project will document and describe unrepresented and endangered varieties of South Bolivian Quechua (SBQ) spoken by SBQ-Aymara balanced bilinguals in rural towns of Northern Potosí, Bolivia.  

Our Director of the Chinese program, Chuan Lin, has just received a STARTALK grant from the NSA. This kind of grant funds innovative programs with strong language learning outcomes for K-16 students. Fantastic work, Chuan! Congratulations!

Congratulations to Peggy Bakula for receiving a Fullbright scholarship for research in Yil, a Torricelli language on Papua New Guinea, working with Professor Matthew Dryer. The project's objective is to document aspects of the cultural heritage of the Yamari people narrated in Yil, their traditional language. While all features of cultural heritage will be chronicled for this project, the focus of the documentation is the Yamari's masalai stories. The masalai are spirits who hold specific associations with people (e.g., clans, descent lines) and places (e.g., villages, garden areas, wild bush). Masalai are a component of traditional faith systems in Papua New Guinea before Christianization. By documenting the Yamari masalai stories, both their traditional beliefs and language are preserved for future generations.

MA student Sarah MacDougall has been awared a Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation. This five-year fellowship provides three years of financial support inclusive of an annual stipend of $37,000. Sarah was the only student from a non-STEM department at UB to receive this fellowship. Starting this Fall, Sarah will join the Psychology Department as a PhD student. Way to go Sarah!

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has elected Professor Jean-Pierre Koenig to the rank of AAAS Fellow for his distinguished contributions to the language sciences and for integrating formal syntax and semantics studies of lexical knowledge across languages of the world with experimental, corpus, and computational techniques. Each year, the Council elects members whose “efforts on behalf of the advancement of science, or its applications, are scientifically or socially distinguished.” The Council elects Fellows deliberately and carefully to preserve the honor attached to this recognition. The honor of being elected a Fellow of AAAS began in 1874. The annual Fellows Forum will be held in Washington, D.C. on September 21, 2024. That evening, there will be a Gala celebrating the 150th anniversary of the AAAS Fellows program at the National Building Museum in D.C. Congratulations JP, this is much deserved!

Individuals who have made distinguished contributions to the discipline are recognized as Fellows of the Linguistic Society of America. Professor Jeff Good was inducted in 2024, among seven other colleagues. Congratulations!

Linguistics major Nicholas Mori is the recipient of the PEARL Award, a new grant of up to $2,500 given by UB’s Experiential Learning Network (ELN) to help students gain valuable experience in their field.

Mori and his mentor, Matthew Faytak, assistant professor in the Department of Linguistics, College of Arts and Sciences, are researching the Kom language of Cameroon. The PEARL grant will support Mori’s travel to Cameroon, where he will collect data on local languages and attend a linguistics conference.

Undergraduate Student Anthony Casseri 's Chinese project has been selected by the National Chinese EXPO of Student Works (NCESW) contest, and is displayed on their website at https://www.aaiceusa.com/collegelevelstudentworks. NCESW is sponsored by the American Academy of International Culture and Education. They received more than four thousand students’ works from the U.S. states and Canada this year. Congratulations to him and to his instructor, Xianxian Fang!

PhD student Candy Angulo Prando won the prize for best poster ($500) at the Digital Engagement with Endangered Languages and their Communities symposium. Congratulations!

This year’s Celebration of Faculty and Staff Academic Excellence, to be held at 3:30p.m. October 26, 2023, in Slee Hall, will honor Linguistics Professor DiCanio, for his National Endowment of Humanities grant, as well as other university faculty.

Congratulations to Dr. Kiyono Fujinaga for her new position as Assistant Teaching Professor of Japanese Studies in the Department of Modern Languages at Carnegie Mellon University! Dr. Fujinaga received her PhD in Linguistics from the UB Department of Linguistics in 2021.

The New York State Education Department has approved a comprehensive examination in Modern Greek that will allow students to apply the study of Modern Greek to their high school diploma. Stefanos Papazaharias, the Modern Greek instructor at UB, assisted with this effort and will support the annual review and assessment of the exam. Modern Greek is one of the eight languages offered at UB through the Department of Linguistics.

Congratulations to PhD Alumnus  Miao Zhang who has accepted a position as a postdoc at the University of Zurich working with Prof. Eleanor Chodroff, on a large project examining crosslinguistic phonetic variation and systematicity, primarily using multilingual spoken corpora.

PhD student Mariana Quintana Godoy received the Language Legacies Grant from the Endangered Language Fund (ELF), to document the Zapotec (Otomanguean) of San Mateo Mixtepec, Oaxaca, a variant that has very little documentation and no known descriptions. The International Phonetics Association is also supporting the proposal. Way to go Mariana!

Congratulations to Associate Professor Christian DiCanio, for a $30,000 NEH Fellowship for the development of a reference grammar of Itunyoso Triqui, an endangered Southern Mexican language.  

Congratulations to Emma Correia for being awarded a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant Award to work and study in Andorra! Emma is a graduating senior majoring in Linguistics and Spanish and was awarded the Outstanding Senior Award in Linguistics for 2022–2023.  Emma describes her goals for her time in Andorra below:

“This grant is the exact intersection of all that I have studied and done during my time here at the University at Buffalo. I am interested in multilingual education systems and minority language maintenance; both being items that I have explored via an independent research project regarding language maintenance in Dari-speaking communities and an independent study centered around multilingual language policies and their effects in the region of Catalonia. The trilingual society of Andorra will allow me to immerse myself in exactly the items that I have previously studied: the continuation and even expansion of the minority language Catalan that coexists with Spanish and French. While I’m unsure exactly what the future holds for me, I plan to return to the United States to pursue an advanced degree that will allow me to continue exploring my passions.”

Way to go Emma! Enjoy this amazing experience!

A number of department members (and alumni) have a paper entitled "Using statistical classification to discover cross-linguistic semantic prototypes: The causation domain" in this years' LSA. This is a large research project, authored by Juergen Bohnemeyer (University at Buffalo), Erika M. Bellingham (University at Buffalo), Andrea Ariño-Bizarro (Universidade de Zaragoza), Emanuel Bylund (Stellenbosch University/Stockholm University), James Essegbey (University of Florida), Stephanie Evers (University at Buffalo), Saima Hafeez (University at Buffalo), Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano (Universidade de Zaragoza), Pia Järnefelt (Uppsala University), Kazuhiro Kawachi (Keio University), Yu Li (Wuhan University), Thomas Li (Beihang University), Du Jing (University of Chinese Academy of Sciences), Tatiana Nikitina (CNRS), Sang-Hee Park (Duksung Women’s University), Anastasia Stepanova (University at Buffalo), Guillermo Montero-Melis (Stockholm University/Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics).