Linguistics

Celebrate the class of 2025 with a slideshow featuring some of their favorite moments!

LINGUISTICS - Ichishkíin, also known as Sahaptin, is a severely endangered Native American language of the Pacific Northwest. Several Tribes from the region are working diligently to revitalize the language and a committed group of educators, linguists and Tribal members at the University of Oregon are working to support those efforts. The latest achievement is the extension of the two-year language learning program to include a third year of instruction in Ichishkíin.

LINGUISTICS – A group of students in the University of Oregon's Department of Linguistics in the College of Arts and Sciences spent nine months in 2024 developing a unique set of open educational resources for language learning, available to the public for free. The book is in use in Linguistics 144 Learning How to Learn.

GLOBAL STUDIES AND LANGUAGES, LINGUISTICS, SPANISH - U.S. Latinx students studying Spanish while studying abroad can encounter discrimination and condescending attitudes from their instructors. For students who grew up speaking Spanish, known as heritage speakers, this can lead to missed learning opportunities, according to Devin Grammon and Sergio Loza, both assistant professors of Spanish sociolinguistics in the College of Arts and Sciences.

HISTORY, LINGUISTICS - A historian and a linguist have received National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH) awards, a prestigious honor that goes to only 16% of applicants in a given year. The grants were awarded to Gabriela Pérez Báez, associate professor of linguistics and director of the Language Revitalization Lab, and Arafaat Valiani, an associate professor in the Department of History and affiliated faculty in the Global Health program.

LINGUISTICS - For the last 30 years, Department of Linguistics Professor Spike Gildea has partnered with Native communities in Brazil to document and analyze the Werikyana language, which today is spoken as a first language by only a handful of people.

The UO’s Environment Initiative has awarded seed funding to five new teaching projects to support faculty members who have proposed innovative courses and dynamic classroom experiences. The funding supports both research and curricular projects and focuses the intellectual energy and work of faculty, students and community partners on a just and livable future through transdisciplinary research, teaching and experiential learning.

ANTHROPOLOGY, ENGLISH, HISTORY, LINGUISTICS, POLITICAL SCIENCE, SOCIOLOGY - The College of Arts and Sciences is adding six Latinx studies tenure-track faculty members in several departments as part of the college’s commitment to becoming a premier institution for Latinx studies while meeting student demand for culturally relevant classes.

February is Black History Month, and many special events are planned on campus. A variety of film screenings include titles such as “Black Orpheus,” “Talking Black in America,” James Blue’s award-winning film “The March,” and Duck After Dark’s screening of “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.”

The University of Oregon continued its multiyear streak of increasing grant funding in fiscal year 2021-22 (FY22). Numerous faculty members received recognition for their contributions to research, as well as the number of research awards with direct positive effects on local and regional communities.