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.
A current initiative within the department is engaging with generative artificial intelligence across theoretical, practical, and ethical dimensions. We are particularly committed to ensuring that Pacific languages and their speakers have a voice in the ongoing development of AI technologies.
The 2025 Conference on the Mosaic of East Asian Language Processing: Exploring Taiwan’s Diversity and Beyond included multiple presentations by faculty and alumni from the Department of Linguistics in November…
The Boston University Conference on Language Development celebrated its 50th year this November. Many UHM faculty, students, and alumni were involved in research presentations, including PhD student Wataru Sugiura who…
Melody Ann Ross (PhD, 2017) recently organized the 16th Linguistic Landscape (link: https://www.ll16-ude.de/) workshop held at the University of Duisburg-Essen. This followed a strong history of UHM connection to the…
Bradley McDonnell, PhD students Blaine Billings, Sebastian (Sebi) Ohara-Saft, and Yumi Standlee gave invited presentations at LRSS 2025, which took place at the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics…
UH Mānoa Linguistics had a strong showing at the 27th International Conference on Historical Linguistics (ICHL 27), held August 18-22 in Santiago, Chile. Leah Pappas presented the paper "The development…
Christina Truong (PhD., 2024) just published her new book, Western Austronesian Applicative Constructions, from the Endangered and Lesser-Studied Languages and Dialects series of the Brill publishing. This open access series…
Congratulations to PhD student Shirley Mordechai, who received a Fellowship Grant from the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture! This award will support her dissertation, "Documentation of the Judeo-Arabic of Marrakech,…
Andrew Cheng co-authored a chapter with Elise McClay and Henny Yeung in an edited volume entitled "Creak: Theories and Practices of Pulse Phonation". The chapter is titled "Mothers and Creak"…
PhD student Carolyn Siegman won an award for Best Student Oral Presentation for her paper “Acoustic and perceptual quality of taps in English-Korean bilingual speech” at NWAV-Asia Pacific in Singapore…
Congratulations to PhD student Liv Bianchini, who recently won a Gorilla Language & Linguistics Grant! The award will help fund her dissertation research into the social and cognitive processing of…
In August 2025 Gary Holton participated in the annual Eyak Culture Camp in Cordova, Alaska. The event drew over 30 participants from across Alaska and the US to the ancestral…
Instructor Zoh Qureshi recently gave a presentation at the Deaf Academic Conference on cultural pedagogy, emphasizing the importance of being open to borrowing signs from other countries as a way…
Dr. Sharon Bulalang (PhD., 2020) published her new book, Western Subanon Grammar, in December 2024. It was published as a part of the Endangered and Lesser-Studied Languages and Dialects (Brill),…
Our department was well represented at the Japanese-Korean Linguistics conference at Cornell (June 13-15). Professor William O’Grady was a keynote speaker in the AI session, one of our alumni (Sungdai…
Carolyn Siegman gave a paper presentation at the conference Emerging Topics in Typology (ETT 2025), which was held at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany from…
Professor Andrew Cheng and Professor Haʻa Solomon (PhD, 2024) have been mentoring undergraduate research, in a project lauded as the “ideal use of UROP funding”. Read more about it here.…
Congratulations to PhD student Orlyn Joyce Esquivel, who is a two-time recipient of an award from the Dr. Teresita V. Ramos Endowment for Philippine Languages, Literature, Culture, and Filipino American…
Professor Emanuel (Manny) Drechsel has become Professor Emeritus, in recognition of his long-standing meritorious contributions to the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Professor Drechsel is known for publications that include…
Carl Polley (PhD, 2012) has been awarded a 2025 Regents’ Medal for Excellence in Teaching for his outstanding instruction in linguistics and Chinese language at Kapiʻolani Community College. Congratulations, Professor…
Congratulations to PhD candidate Emma Breslow on receiving grants from the Elizabeth Spann Student Enrichment Fund and from the Laurence C. and M. Terry Thompson Fund for Research and Publication…
Professor Andrew Cheng and Lisa Jeon (University of North Texas) have published an entry in the Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of World Englishes, "American English Phonology", describing sound features that distinguish…
The Department of Linguistics contributed two presentations to the 2025 UH Mānoa Research Day at the State Capitol. PhD candidate Josiah Murphy discussed her research project ‘Canoeing in Hawai'i and…
Congratulations to PhD student Orlyn Joyce Esquivel, who is a two-time recipient of an award from the Dr. Teresita V. Ramos Endowment for Philippine Languages, Literature, Culture, and Filipino American Studies.…
We are pleased to announce that PhD Candidate Henry Osborne has been awarded a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant from NSF (advisor: Gary Holton), for the project: A Spatial Grammar…
The 9th International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation (ICLDC) was a great success! From March 6-9, UHM Linguistics welcomed over 400 attendees to discuss the conference theme: Navigating new…
We are happy to announce that Akari Ohba (Ph.D., 2024) has formally accepted a position as lecturer (assistant professor, permanent position) in the English linguistics section of the Department of…
We are delighted to share that four UHM Linguistics Alumni have recently accepted positions as faculty at various institutions! Nozomi Tanaka (PhD 2016) has joined the Department of Linguistics at…
Carolyn Siegman and Shelece Easterday both presented research at the 15th International Conference of the Association for Linguistic Typology (ALTXV) in Singapore from December 4-6, 2024. Siegman gave a paper…
Current UHM Linguistics undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, and alumni met up at the 52nd New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV) to present their research in Miami Beach, November 7-9,…
UHM Linguistics is thrilled to announce the launch of a new project to document and support Micronesian languages through training of UH undergraduate and graduate students and capacity building within…
UHM linguistics alumni, Thomas Kettig and Jonny Kim, presented at LabPhon19 in Seoul, South Korea from June 26 - 29, 2024. Here they are pictured with current student Carolyn Siegman…
Join us in congratulating UHM linguistics PhD candidate Anu Reddy for being awarded the Jagdish P. Sharma Memorial Scholarship for the 2024-2025 academic year. Congratulations, Anu!
Alumni, faculty, and graduate students from UHM linguistics presented at the 25th Sociolinguistics Symposium in Perth, Australia, June 24 - 27, 2024. Caroline Hendy (MA, 2021) and current PhD candidate…
Linguistics faculty member Andrew Cheng has had a new article published online in Asia-Pacific Language Variation entitled: "Variation in Asian and Pacific Islander North American English: What the patterns of…
UH Mānoa had a strong presence at the 16th International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics, held June 20-24 2024 in Manila, Philippines. Linguistics faculty, current students, and alumni presented papers and…
Dr. Andrew Cheng was interviewed recently for the Grammar Girl podcast to chat about language, linguistics, and movies. The podcast is also available on YouTube. Congratulations Andrew!
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…
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