Welcome to the Department of Linguistics!
Close to one-half of the world’s six thousand languages are spoken in the Pacific and Asia — the particular geographic focus of our department. A large portion of these languages are either underdocumented or entirely undocumented, and many have small speaker populations. Several of our faculty enjoy international renown for their research on the languages of the Pacific and Asia, and we are currently the only institution in the United States that offers a graduate program in language documentation and conservation. One of our M.A. programs is specifically designed to prepare students for leadership roles in conservation and documentation efforts, and our Ph.D. program offers similar opportunities at a more advanced level. We also offer an Interdisciplinary BA in Linguistics, as well as a minor in Linguistics. American Sign Language classes, which fulfill the Hawaiian or Second Language general education requirement, are also delivered in the Department of Linguistics.
Our department contributes to the interdisciplinary effort to understand the workings of the human mind through its experimental work on the language faculty, centered around the College’s Language Analysis and Experimentation Laboratories. We have well known and established specialists in the areas of language acquisition, psycholinguistics, and sociophonetics.
Two special strengths of the department include its focus on the issue of language sustainability and diversity in the Pacific and Asia, and its commitment to the study of language through the tools of contemporary cognitive science in addition to more traditional analytic techniques.
Linguists Dr. Emanuel Drechsel and Dr. Teresa Makuakāne-Drechsel, who have been ardent and enthusiastic supporters of ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi, were recently celebrated in an article by the UH Foundation, which describes…
Professor Amy Schafer and PhD alumnus Ivan Bondoc presented their poster "Gradient effects on pivot accessibility in Tagalog quantifier float" at the 31st meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association,…
Doctoral student Carolyn Siegman interned for the LSA's Linguistics Career Launch '24 in the summer of 2024. The LCL is a programmatic effort to help students and faculty learn more…
Doctoral student Emma Breslow and MA alumna Caroline Hendy presented their paper, "From shpiel to shemozzle: A study of familiarity with Jewish English lexical items in Australia and the United…
Dr. Katsura Aoyama (PhD 2000) has been promoted to Full Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of North Texas. Katsura's research interests include phonological acquisition in typically-developing…
Hoʻomaikaʻi to our Spring 2024 graduates! BA: Sarah Ku MA: Margaret Asperheim, Angeli Noelle Cabrera, Justin Hong, Jezzabella Jimenez, Amanda Le, Yihan Li, Kianu Schwerdtfeger PhD: A. Blake, Amber Camp,…
Three graduates of our department – Sumittra Suraratdecha (Mahidol University), Nala Lee (National University of Singapore), and Sejung Yang (Jeju National University), were among those invited to speak at a…
Professor Andrew Cheng was recently interviewed by NBC News about his research for a news story entitled "Some say they can hear an 'Asian American' accent, others deny it exists."…
The 5th NINJAL-UHM Linguistics Workshop was held here on the Mānoa campus (St. John 11) between April 27 and 28, 2024. This is the 5th workshop that the National Institute…
Doctoral students Anu Reddy and Youngin Lee presented at the 17th Generative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition Conference (GASLA) held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (May 2-4, 2024).…
Professor Andrew Cheng (Linguistics) and Professor Haʻalilio Solomon (Kawaihuelani) have been awarded a $10,000 Mentoring Grant for Summer Undergraduate Research and Creative Work from UROP. The project, "Undergraduate-led Linguistics Researchin…
The Department of Linguistics is pleased to announce the soft launching of the Kūpinaʻi Language Center (Moore Hall 151), which took place on April 23, 2024. The event was the…
Henry Osborne presents at MILS Michol Miller and Armando Molina Gomez at MILS Rui Yamawaki presents at MILS Students in the Department of Linguistics co-hosted the 1st Mānoa Interdepartmental Language…
PhD student Louward Zubiri has received the 2024 Student Award for Excellence in Research at the Doctoral Level. This is an annual competition hosted by the UHM Office of the…
Professor Shelece Easterday has been awarded the 2023-2024 Mānoa Excellence Presidential Citation for Meritorious Teaching. This award recognizes faculty members who have made significant contributions to teaching and student learning.…
Alumna Michelle Kamigaki-Baron (MA 2020) was featured on Hawaiʻi Public Radio on March 28 2024 for her doctoral research on the benefits of Hawaiʻi Pidgin on learning ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi. Michelle…
Professor Shin Fukuda's experimental study on deverbal nominals in Japanese recently appeared in the Journal of Japanese Linguistics. Congratulations, Shin!
Doctoral student Carolyn Siegman was recently awarded the Library Treasures Scholarship from the University of Hawaiʻi Library at Mānoa to conduct a typological study on stop-to-fricative and stop-to-approximant lenition processes.…
Doctoral student Sydney Ludlow presented her paper, "Voiceless Stops and Their Variants: A lenition continuum in Pastaza Quichua" at the annual meeting of the Society for the Study of the…
Professor Brad McDonnell and PhD student Christina Truong have published a chapter called "28 Applicative constructions in languages of western Indonesia" in the volume Applicative Constructions in the World’s Languages,…
Doctoral student Clé Mayer was recently awarded a full scholarship to the GIS for Sustainability and Resilience in the Pacific Foundations Course given at UN CIFAL (Chaminade) together with the…
Congratulations to PhD student Louward Zubiri on multiple news items: Louward was part of the Philippine panel at the 7th International Conference on Language and Education in Bangkok, Thailand. This…
Congratulations to all our Fall 2023 graduates! BA: Bethany Cox and Liv PeraltaMA: Angeli Noelle CabreraPhD: Porpla Nusartlert, Kavon Hooshiar and Tom Dougherty
PhD student Anongnard Porpla Nusartlert and Professor Kamil Deen presented a paper at the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society meeting in Chiang Mai, Thailand, in May 2023. Their paper was entitled…
PhD student Emma Breslow presented her poster "The macher wears a yarmi: A comparative study of Australian and American familiarity with Jewish English lexical items" at the Linguistic Society of…
In 2023, PhD students Blaine Billings and Jacob Hakim were each awarded the American Institute for Indonesian Studies - Council of American Overseas Research Centers (AIFIS-CAORC) Research Fellowship for fieldwork…
On November 1-3, 2023 the department hosted a meeting of the Governance Council of the the Endangered Languages Project, welcoming three new Council members: Gabriela Perez-Baez (University of Oregon), Madoka…
PhD student Olivia Waring has been selected to teach a workshop at CoLang 2024 which will be hosted by the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community and the University of Arizona…
PhD student Carolyn Siegman presented at the NWAV conference held at Queen's College in October 2023. Her paper was titled "Variation in /st/ cluster production of Western Andalusian Spanish." Congratulations,…
Professor Andrew Cheng has had multiple papers published or accepted for publication in recent months: Jeon, L. & Cheng, A. (Forthcoming). American English phonology. In K. Bolton (Ed.) Wiley Blackwell…
Professor Shelece Easterday recently delivered a two-part plenary address at the 6th Edinburgh Symposium on Historical Phonology in December 2023. Her talk was entitled "Can we talk? Bridging the divide…
Professor Kamil Deen was invited to give the plenary address at the 48th Annual Meeting of the Boston University Conference on Language Development, November 2-5, 2023. Professor Deen's address was…
UH was well-represented at the Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing Asia conference in Hong Kong, December 1-3, 2023. Akari Ohba and Kamil Deen presented "Why children (incorrectly) accept inverse…
The UHM Department of Linguistics was very well represented at the 2023 LSA Summer Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Six graduate students were in attendance (more than any…
Many linguists from the UHM Department of Linguistics presented their work at the 48th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, held November 2-5, 2023. Professor Kamil Deen delivered a…
PhD student Youngin Lee presented her research entitled "Examining incremental sentence processing in Korean: The case of control constructions" at the 4th International Conference on Theoretical East Asian Psycholinguistics in…
PhD student Orlyn Joyce Esquivel presented several papers in the summer and fall of 2023. She presented her paper "Philippines' linguistic landscape: Perceptions on ethnolinguistic vitality, identity and power" at…
Department of Linguistics MA graduate Bonnie Windham is currently working as the Language Access Manager at the state of Oregon Department of Human Services, a job in which she ensures…
Dr. Mary Walworth earned her PhD in linguistics in our department in 2015, and has since become a leader in linguistic research with speakers of Oceanic languages. She is currently…
Dr. Anna Belew, who graduated with a doctorate from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Department of Linguistics in 2020, is currently the Executive Director of The Endangered Languages Project…
Dr. Khairunnisa Dr. Khairunnisa, who also goes by “Nisa,” completed her PhD in the Department of Linguistics in 2022 and has recently joined BRIN, The National Research and Innovation Agency…
Dr. Akiemi Glenn Dr. Akiemi Glenn earned her PhD in the UHM Department of Linguistics in 2012, and has since become a leader in the nonprofit world in Honolulu. She…
Stephanie Witkowski Stephanie Witkowski, who graduated from the UH Mānoa Department of Linguistics with an MA in 2013, is currently the Executive Director of 7000 Languages, a nonprofit organization that…
University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Department of Linguistics
1890 East West Road, Moore Hall 569 [map]
Honolulu, Hawaiʻi 96822 USA
Office Hours M-F 8 AM – 4:30 PM
+1(808) 956-8602 / linguist@hawaii.edu