“Monophthongization and Diphthongization in Upper Saxon” by Beat Siebenhaar at Vowels in Motion, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, July 17, 2025 www.phonetik.uni-muenchen.de/Forschung/DI...

“Gestural representation and sound change in diphthong systems” by Patrycja Strycharczuk at Vowels in Motion, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, July 17, 2025 www.phonetik.uni-muenchen.de/Forschung/DI...

“Time-resolved variation in Southern Bavarian diphthong trajectories” by Aleese Block at Vowels in Motion, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, July 17, 2025 www.phonetik.uni-muenchen.de/Forschung/DI...

“Prominence as a cue to the diphthong/hiatus distinction: A preliminary analysis on Campidanese Sardinian” by Andrea Brugnoli at Vowels in Motion, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, July 17, 2025 www.phonetik.uni-muenchen.de/Forschung/DI...

“Vowel inventories, syllable structure and rhythm types in the Romance languages: Are there typological generalizations regarding diphthongs?” by Stephan Schmid at Vowels in Motion, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, July 17, 2025 www.phonetik.uni-muenchen.de/Forschung/DI...

“Patterns of vowel assimilation and dissimilation in diphthongs and triphthongs in the Romance languages. Articulatory and perceptual motivation” by Daniel Recasens at Vowels in Motion, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, July 17, 2025 www.phonetik.uni-muenchen.de/Forschung/DI...

Great study: “Vowel nasalization and the path to sound change: an MRI study of American and Southern British English /nt, nd/” by Jonathan Harrington, Conceição Cunha, Dirk Voit, Jens Frahm and Philip Hoole (Dec. ’25) muse.jhu.edu/article/978272

“Phonetic training and talker variability in the perception of Spanish stop consonants” by Iván Andreu Rascón (Dec. ’25) www.mdpi.com/2226-471X/11...

“Neural indices of phonological and acoustic–phonetic perception” by Yasuaki Shinohara and Valerie L. Shafer (Dec. ’25) www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

“Minimal wordlist size for a phonological profile: New evidence from Kra-Dai languages” by Kanyarin Boonkongchuen and Rikker Dockum (May ’25) journals.linguisticsociety.org/proceedings/...

“A palatographic study of Shughni [sgh: SE Iranian] consonants” by Makarov Yury (Dec. ’25) istina.ficp.ac.ru/publications...

“Merge-based syntax is mediated by distinct neurocognitive mechanisms in 84,000 individuals with language deficits across nine languages” by Elliot Murphy, Rohan Venkatesh, Edward Khokhlovich and Andrey Vyshedskiy (Dec. ’25) link.springer.com/article/10.1...

“Effects of syllable frequency in speech production: a replication and extension of the Mental Syllabary account” by Julia Chauvet, Sophie Slaats, David Poeppel and Antje S. Meyer (Dec. ’25) papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

“Prosodic strengthening and focus type in Persian: an EMA study” by Simon Roessig, Mortaza Taheri-Ardali, Lena Pagel and Doris Mücke (Dec. ’25) osf.io/preprints/ps...

“Duration as a secondary cue in Spanish rhotics: sliding to understand perceptual categorization among heritage and L2 learners of Spanish” by Rachel Sangster Garza and Erik W. Willis (Dec. ’25) revistes.uab.cat/isogloss/art...

“Pitch accent distribution in Breton dialects: from phonology to typology” by Seongwoo Kang (Dec. ’25) www.academia.edu/144727942/Pi...

“Morris Halle: in memoriam 1923–2018” by Donca Steriade (Dec. ’25) lingphil.mit.edu/papers/steri... (27 pages!)

“When French is nosy, Moroccan Arabic is faithful: the adaptation of French nasal vowels in Moroccan Arabic” by Nabila Louriz (Dec. ’25) brill.com/view/journal...

“What drives L3 English nasal acquisition? Evidence of cross-linguistic influence from L1 and L2 in Sinitic speakers” by Yi Zhu and Jun Wang (Dec. ’25) www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1...

“Back mid vowels in Podhale Goralian: distribution and spelling,” talk given by Tomasz Łuszczek at the 8th Białystok-Kyiv Conference on Theoretical and Applied Linguistics (Dec. ’25) talc.uwb.edu.pl/wp-content/u...

“Sarechālí: the Jewish dialect of the Jews of Tehran” by Alan Niku (Dec. ’25) brill.com/view/journal...

“The life cycle of fricative dissimilation in Hutterisch and Bavarian varieties” by Joachim Kokkelmans and Birgit Alber (Dec. ’25) s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/eu-st01.ext....

“Predictability affects spoken phonological systems indirectly” by Uriel Cohen Priva (Dec. ’25) compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirec...

Congratulations to Prof. Diego Krivochen on his latest article, “EPP: can’t live with it, can’t raise without it,” in the Canadian Journal of Linguistics www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

We are happy to announce that Dr. Diego Gabriel Krivochen will be joining our Division of Linguistics as a new assistant professor (LTA) in January 2026.

#OTD 160 years ago, Hermann Hirt (1865–1936) was born 🥳 Hirt was one of the most influential Indo-Europeanists and he specialized in Proto-Indo-European (PIE) stress and ablaut. He supported the claim that the PIE homeland was located in Northern Europe. #Histlx #LinguisticBirthdays

“Platonic Forms in the Study of Language and Mind,” new 2.5-hr (!) lecture by Elliot Murphy m.youtube.com/watch?v=pqDn...

Strangely beautiful: “The English Great Vowel Shift in action!” by Geoff Lindsey www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvLY...

The Merriam-Webster gives ‘aisling’ as /ˈɑɪ.ʃlɪŋ/. Does anyone actually have that pronunciation and syllabification?

“Morphemes in phonology” by Eva Zimmermann, to appear in The Cambridge Handbook of Phonology, 2nd Edition by Paul de Lacy and Adam Jardine www.evazimmermann.org/uploads/1/1/...

“Spelling and phonology of the Cuneiform Luwian ABL/INS ending” by Oscar Billing (2024) www.oscarbilling.se/pdfs/billing...

“Iotacism in Egyptian Greek: Greek-internal development and transfer effect from Egyptian-Coptic” by Sonja Dahlgren (Dec. ’25) www.hup.fi/chapters/e/1...

The Fifth meeting of the Princeton Phonology Forum (PɸF 2026) will be held at Princeton University on May 15–May 16, 2026. The theme for PɸF 2026 is “Register and subtonal features.” Abstract deadline: Feb. 15 linguistics.princeton.edu/pphf/

Merriam-Webster’s human editors have chosen ‘slop’ as the 2025 Word of the Year www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/wor...

Irving Finkel (Assistant Keeper of Ancient Mesopotamian Script, Languages and Cultures in the Department of the Middle East at the British Museum) interviewed by Lex Fridman youtu.be/_bBRVNkAfkQ

“Linguistic experience and the representation of phonological features: perception, processing, and second language acquisition” by Xuanda Chen (June ’25) escholarship.mcgill.ca/concern/thes...

“Prosody and information structure” by Jennifer Cole (Dec. ’25) www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

“Brazilian-Portuguese-learning preschoolers use phrasal prosody to constrain their interpretation of ellipsis” by Letícia S. Kolberg, A. de Carvalho and A. Christophe (Dec. ’25) www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1...

“Lexical competition does not age: a spoken word recognition study” by Guillaume Hureaux, Serge Pinto and Sophie Dufour (Dec. ’25) www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1...

“The Mixtec couplet is not a consistent grammatical unit” by Ben Eischens and Ryan T. Bennett (Dec. ’25) www.glossa-journal.org/article/id/1...

Phonology can’t change mid-word according to Archibald ’25 journals.psu.edu/continua/art... His claim is likely too strong, but it’s not falsified by cases like Persian-English /baɾfɪŋ/ ‘snowing’, because Archibald allows prosodic-word-level codeswitching, and ‑ing happens to be a pword-level suffix

New minimal pair! Skyffel /ˈskɐi̯fəl/ vs. skyful /ˈskɑɪ̯fəl/

“New Bactrian documents from the Hindukush: remarks on orthography, phonology, and etymology” by Julian Kreidl (Dec. ’25) www.lockwoodonlinejournals.com/index.php/ja...

Cool: “The phonology of rr and r in Khotanese [a.k.a. Khotan Saka]” by Alessandro Del Tomba (Dec. ’25) lockwoodonlinejournals.com/index.php/ja...

The /uː–juː/ contrast is strong (pook–puke, boot–bute, food–feud, moot–mute, coot–cute, etc.) whereas the /ʊ–jʊ/ contrast is marginal. There is ‘put’, ‘bull’, ‘foot’, ‘mook’, ‘cook’, ‘good’, ‘hood’, etc., but no corresponding primary or secondary stressed /pjʊ…, bjʊ…, fjʊ…, mjʊ…, kjʊ…, ɡjʊ…, hjʊ…/

Yikes: “Oliver Sacks put himself into his case studies. What was the cost? The scientist was famous for linking healing with storytelling. Sometimes that meant reshaping patients’ reality” by Rachel Aviv (Dec. ’25) www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

“Early transcriptions of English and French in the International Phonetic Association: the weight of spelling reform on the birth of the IPA” by Jacques Durand and Chantal Lyche (Sep. ’25) www.isca-archive.org/hscr_2025/du...

A nice near-minimal pair in this vein: ‘stifle’ /ˈstɐi̯fəl/ vs. ‘sighful’ /ˈsɑɪ̯fəl/ www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/s...