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More Like ThisCongratulations
Prof. Kyle Gorman was invited to present a talk titled, “Massive Multilingualism in Speech and Language Technology”, at the Multidisciplinary Seminar series at the Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality, Home of the US Office of LIS at the CUNY Graduate Center on March 3rd, 2023. Register here.
- Announcement
Congratulations
Stefanie Reed (Ph.D. student) co-authored a paper titled, "The Role of Prosody in Disambiguating English Indirect Requests" in Language and Speech journal, Volume 66 Issue 1.
- Announcement
Prof. Dan Kaufman
Prof. Dan Kaufman organized a mini-conference, "Come celebrate International Mother Tongue Day at Endangered Language Alliance" on February 21, 2023.
Topics included:
-Why and how should we protect multilingualism? A panel discussion hosted virtually by Manchester City of Languages as part of the Muslim Arts & Culture Festival.
-Concejo de Pueblos Originarios program featuring the launch of the Indigenous Youth Song Contest. Hear from representatives of the Ayujk, Mam, Me'phaa, Na Savi and Kichwa communities about their work preserving their languages in speech and song.
-Raising City Kids in Indigenous Languages". Families share their experiences in raising children in their mother tongue, culminating in the launch of a year long effort to support a small group of parents to do just that.
- Announcement
RISLUS
Alumni Jennifer Chard, Anthony Vicario, and Elizabeth Garza, and Prof. Gita Martohardjono will present a paper titled Culturally and Linguistically Responsive Multilingual Literacy Assessments at the 52nd Conference of the National Association for Bilingual Education (NABE) in Portland, Oregon, Feb 23-25, 2023. This presentation is based on work of the Multilingual Literacy SIFE Screener and Newcomer Assessment projects at RISLUS.
- Announcement
Recent Linguistics News
Jan 23, 2023
Online Talk Is a Window Into Culture
Linguistics professor teams up with grads and a student to produce a book on how we use language on social media.
- GC Stories
- Faculty News
- Alumni News
- Student News
Nov 8, 2022
Bringing Linguistics to His Brooklyn Classroom
A high school teacher returns to finish his Ph.D. and finds new relevance for his expertise.
- GC Stories
- Student News
Oct 28, 2022
Master’s Alum Pursues a Passion for Language at Stony Brook
Research opportunities helped a Linguistics master’s graduate move on to a Ph.D. in a discipline he loves.
- GC Stories
- Alumni News
Sep 30, 2022
Professor Gita Martohardjono Receives $1.48M Grant From NYSED
The state education department grant supports a digital literacy and math skills assessment in 18 languages.
- Faculty News
Linguistics Books

Digital Orality
Vernacular Writing in Online Spaces
co-edited by May Ahmar (Linguistics Ph.D. candidate), Wafa Bahri (Ph.D. '19, Linguistics)
This volume showcases innovative research on dialectal, vernacular, and other forms of “oral,” speech-like writing in digital spaces. The shift from a predominantly print culture to a digital culture is shaping people's identities and relationships to one another in important ways. Using examples from distinct international contexts and language varieties (kiAmu, Lebanese, Ettounsi, Shanghai Wu, Welsh English, and varieties of American English) the authors examine how people use unexpected codes, scripts, and spellings to say something about who they are or aspire to be. This book will be of particular interest to students and scholars interested in the impact of social media on language use, style, and orthography, as well as those with a broader interest in literacy, communication, language contact, and language change.
The book contains chapters written by May Ahmar (Linguistics Ph.D. candidate), Wafa Bahri (Ph.D. '19, Linguistics), Eric Chambers (Ph.D. '17, Linguistics), and Michelle McSweeney (Ph.D. ‘16, Linguistics)
Published November 2022

Language in Development: A Crosslinguistic Perspective
The MIT Press, 2021
Gita Martohardjono and Suzanne Flynn (editors)
Explorations of language development in different types of learner populations and across various languages.
This volume examines language development in different types of learner populations and across various languages. The contributors analyze experimental studies of child and adult language acquisition, heritage language development, bilingualism, and language disorders. They consider theoretical and methodological issues; language development in children, discussing topics that range from gestures to errors in person and number agreement; and development and attrition of (morpho)syntactic constructions in second language learners, bilinguals, and Alzheimer's patients.
The approach is "crosslinguistic" in three senses of the word: The contributors offer analyses of acquisition phenomena in different languages; they consider "crosslinguistic influence," or the potential effects of multiple languages on one another in the mind of the same speaker; and (in a novel use of the term, proposed by the editors) the chapters bring together theoretical and methodological approaches pertinent to the linguistics of language development in children, adults, and heritage speakers.
Book contributors include several Graduate Center scholars: Distinguished Professor Virginia Valian (GC/Hunter, Psychology); Professor Emerita Elaine Klein (GC/Queens, Linguistics); and Graduate Center alumni Christen Madsen (Ph.D. '18, Linguistics) Ian Phillips (Ph.D. '18, Linguistics); and Michael Stern (M.A. '20, Linguistics).
Published September 2021

Finite-State Text Processing
Morgan and Claypool Publishers, 2021
Kyle Gorman and Richard Sproat
Weighted finite-state transducers (WFSTs) are commonly used by engineers and computational linguists for processing and generating speech and text. This book first provides a detailed introduction to this formalism. It then introduces Pynini, a Python library for compiling finite-state grammars and for combining, optimizing, applying, and searching finite-state transducers. This book illustrates this library's conventions and use with a series of case studies. These include the compilation and application of context-dependent rewrite rules, the construction of morphological analyzers and generators, and text generation and processing applications.
Published May 2021