Category: Alumni News

Ember Van Allen (BA 2004, MA 2006), who works for Sensory, Inc., sends the following announcement:

I’m a linguist working for Sensory, Inc., in Portland, Oregon, and I’m currently modeling Arabic phonology for a speech recognition product. I’m looking for a native speaker of Gulf Arabic (preferably from Saudi Arabia) with a background in linguistics who can work approximately 20 hours (perhaps more) over the next few weeks to two months. The work would primarily be answering my questions about the language, mostly regarding phonology and text normalization, and some amount of review or light phonetic transcription. The speaker would be employed as a paid, temporary contract consultant, with flexible hours. There would be no need to travel, as the consultation would happen predominately by email and occasionally by phone.

To learn more about this opportunity, see the posting outside the department office.

From John:

I’m writing to tell you about an exciting study abroad program I will be leading in Spain during Summer 2012. This is a UCSD Global Seminar, where students accompany UCSD faculty for a 5-week summer program. The program is open to college students from any college in the US.

This will be the fifth year I have offered this very successful program. It includes two 4-unit, upper-division courses: one on Spanish Dialectology and one on Flamenco History and Culture. There are no prerequisites (Spanish is not required either). The program combines flamenco music and dance with Spanish dialects on location in the beautiful, historic port city of Cadiz, Spain, from June 20-August 4, 2012.

This program has attracted a diverse group of students from a variety of backgrounds and majors. At UCSD, the courses satisfy a number of General Education requirements, as well as requirements in the Linguistics, Language Studies, Latin American Studies, Ethnic Studies, Communications, History, Anthropology, Literature, and Music majors and minors. They may satisfy additional requirements as well.

The dialectology course covers technical linguistics aspects of Spanish Language history and dialectology. It also discusses the history of Spain and Latin America, from the Islamic period, through the reconquest and the colonial period. In particular, it deals with the social factors: strong versus weak social ties that lead to basic dialect similarities and differences in the Spanish-speaking world.

The flamenco course also deals with technical aspects of flamenco and the structure of its oral tradition, but also discusses the historical and social aspects of its development, including the Spanish Roma diaspora.

More information is available here.