GC CUNY - Linguistics Program

Join us for the second Linguistics Colloquium of the semester featuring Gary Thoms (New York University).
Professor Thoms will present a talk titled: “Case alternations and the dance of subjects and objects”.
📅 March 12, 2026
⏰ 4:15 PM (ET)
📍 Room 9205
🔗 Registration link in bio

💬🌎 Happy International Mother Language Day to those who celebrate!
Today, we reaffirm the value of every language: those we grow up with, inherit, learn, mix, and carry across borders.

During International Mother Language Day Week, join us for Spirit Language, a talk grounded in Indigenous epistemologies.
📅 Friday, Feb 20, 2-4pm | Hybrid event
🔗 Register at the link in bio!

🎶 ELA Revitalization Seminar - Spring 2026
Is there a relationship between documenting traditional songs and music and the revitalization of Mapuzugun?
🗓️ Feb 20, 2026 | 4:30–6:00 PM (ET)
🎤 Andrea Salazar Vega + ülkantufe
📍 Hybrid: ELA (NYC) & Zoom

🔗 Zoom: us02web.zoom.us/j/86...

Our first Linguistics Colloquium of the semester is coming up!
🎤 Maria Kouneli (Rutgers University)
📖 Marked nominative in Nilo-Saharan
🗓 Feb 5, 2026 | ⏰ 4:15 PM ET
📍 Room 9205

Register at the link in bio!

Huge congratulations to PhD Candidate Aidan Malanoski on two honors from the @americandialect.org:
🏅 Presidential Honorary Membership Award, recognizing outstanding students (and including 4 years of complimentary ADS membership)
🏅 Best Student Poster Award at the ADS Annual Meeting

📣 Happening this Friday!
Sociolinguistics Brunch with Prof. Laada Bilaniuk

🗓 Dec 12, 2pm
📍 Room 7102 + Zoom
🔗 Register at the link in bio!

Huge thanks to our SYNC organizers (Jie Sheng, Leila Habibi, Nazmiye Öyük) and Chairs (Ilaria Porru, Maggie Matte, Clara McMahon), and to all our speakers for an inspiring day of research.
Swipe for some highlights!

Our final stretch of 2025 is packed! This week we have our:

📚 Last Colloquium
☕️ Last Socio Brunch
🎉 End-of-Semester Potluck party (current students & faculty only)

See you there!

On Jan 23, join us for a full-day workshop dedicated to Logical Phonology - a minimalist, substance-free theory of phonology which makes limited ontological commitments and uses set-theoretic representations and a rule interpretation procedure based on subsumption.
Find out more at the link in bio!

Language expert shares why so many places in Minnesota start with "Minne" Why do so many places in Minnesota start with "Minne?" Susan-Elizabeth Littlefield has the answer to a Good Question that has stumped lifelong Minnesotans.

Language expert shares why so many places in Minnesota start with "Minne" #CBS

SynTeach Focus Group Interest Form SynTeach is a project researching peoples' experiences teaching and learning syntax in higher education. We have conducted surveys of the field including syntax instructors and students, and we are pl...

SynTeach is going to #LSA2026! We're doing focus groups while we're there so if you're interested, fill in the form and tick the LSA box. We're looking for teachers and students, people who loved syntax and people who hated it... anyone with syntax Thoughts! #linguistics forms.gle/PiBYpVPr1yg2...

📣 Our final Linguistics Colloquium of the semester is this week!

Join us for Prof. Lei Liu’s talk, “Why Some Sentences Trip Us Up: Insights from Minimalist Grammar Parsing Models.”
🗓 Thursday, Dec 11
⏰ 4:15–6:15pm
📍 Room 9207

Register at the link in bio!
All are welcome! ✨

Keynote at SYNC right now!
Prof. Garley presents "Orthographic instability and orthographic freedom in language contact"

📣 Sociolinguistics Brunch on Dec 12!
We’re excited to host Prof. Laada Bilaniuk for a talk on Ukrainian dialects, surzhyks, code-switching, and language politics.

🗓 Dec 12, 2pm
📍 Room 7102 + Zoom
🔗Register at the link in bio!

SYNC is tomorrow at @thegraduatecenter.bsky.social! 🎉
Come support our GC Linguistics students as they present across Experimental, Syntax/Semantics, and Computational Linguistics, plus a keynote by our own Prof. Matt Garley.
More info at the link in bio!

See you there! 💙✨

SYNC is tomorrow at the GC! 🎉
Come support our students presenting their research:
• Katsiaryna Aharodnik
• Evan Li
• Malek Azadegan
See you there! 💙✨

sync25.commons.gc.cuny.edu/schedule/

📝 Getting Work Published workshop with Prof. Blevins!
For current GC Linguistics students only.
Dec 4 · 4:15–6:15 PM · Room 7102.

Today, skip the Black Friday chaos and register for SYNC instead!
🔗 Link in bio.

🍁Happy Thanksgiving from our department to yours! Wishing you a restful break, delicious food, and a quiet inbox. ✨

📣 It’s that time of year: the SYNC schedule is out!
Our annual student-led conference with Stony Brook, Yale, NYU, and CUNY is back (and this year, we’re hosting it!)
📅 Saturday, Dec. 6th
📍 GC CUNY
🔗 Full schedule: link in bio

Millennials Use This Phrase As A Crutch — And It's More Than Just Annoying "I’ve transitioned to ‘haha’ instead of ‘lol’ because I read that 'lol' is millennial-coded."

Why Do Millennials Feel Compelled To Write 'Lol' After Everything?

Our next Linguistics Colloquium is TOMORROW! Join us for a talk by Milena Šereikaitė (Cornell University):
✨ “On the nature of syntactic atoms: a view from Lithuanian Nominalizations”
📍 Hybrid: Room 4116 & Zoom

All are welcome! Register at the link in bio

🎃 Happy Halloween to our CUNY community — stay safe, have fun, and don’t ghost your assignments! 💀📚

TOMORROW! Register - Link in bio!

💻 GC Linguistics students, join us for the next Professional Development session with Prof. Caplan:
“Using online platforms for data collection”
🗓️ Next week - Thursday Nov 6, 4:15–6:15pm. Room 7102
👩‍🏫 Led by Prof. Caplan
🔹Note: this event is open only to Linguistics department students.

Why Bilingual Hispanic Teachers Make a Big Difference for English Learners A new study found benefits from hiring teachers of color with language certifications.

Why Bilingual Hispanic Teachers Make a Big Difference for English Learners

Welcome! You are invited to join a meeting: Sociolinguistics Talk with Kaushalya Perera. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the meeting. Welcome! You are invited to join a meeting: Sociolinguistics Talk with Kaushalya Perera. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the meeting.

🍽️ Sociolinguistics Brunch

Join us for Marrying the Monster, a talk by Kaushalya Perera (University of Colombo) exploring ELT, ESL, higher education, and the World Bank.

Friday, Oct. 31 - 10am-12pm
🗓️ Hybrid event | 🏛️ CUNY Graduate Center, Room 7102 or Zoom

🔗 tinyurl.com/52z9zm4x

We’re happy to share that Kyle Gorman and Charles Reiss have a forthcoming paper in Phonology (@universitypress.cambridge.org):
“Metaphony in Substance-Free Logical Phonology.”

👏 Congratulations to Prof. Gorman and Prof. Reiss on this exciting achievement!

Only in New York: Linguists Build a Database of Everyday Talk Across the Boroughs Graduate Center scholars lead a project to document the accents and speech patterns unique to New York in an unprecedented record.

“Yous talkin’ to me?” A massive new project is capturing how New Yorkers really sound — from “Mary” to “marry” and everything in between. Read more