Andrew Garrett
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andrewgarrett.bsky.social
Andrew Garrett
@andrewgarrett.bsky.social
1K followers 540 following 280 posts
Linguist @ UC Berkeley. Language documentation, archiving, and historical linguistics. "Basic Yurok" (2014) and "The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall: Language, memory, and Indigenous California" (2023). Running; semi-competitive age-grade racer.
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andrewgarrett.bsky.social
New podcast about @ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social linguistics grad student Tyler Lee-Wynant and the work of the California Language Archive. Give it a listen! (You can turn the volume way down when my voice comes on.)

news.berkeley.edu/2025/11/06/b...
For 50 years, she recorded her Pomo language. Her voice is helping one student reclaim his culture. - Berkeley News
For Berkeley graduate student Tyler Lee-Wynant, linguistic materials in the California Language Archive featuring his great-great aunt have opened a portal to his family’s history and led him to teach...
news.berkeley.edu
November 7, 2025 at 4:04 PM
andrewgarrett.bsky.social
Work in the California Language Archive to support language reclamation:

news.berkeley.edu/2025/11/06/2...
23 boxes and a suitcase full of tapes: How a linguist's lifelong work is shaping Indigenous language today - Berkeley News
Collections at UC Berkeley's California Language Archive help keep Indigenous languages alive. This is the story of one of them.
news.berkeley.edu
November 7, 2025 at 1:39 AM
andrewgarrett.bsky.social
Here's a short, inattentive (but positive), and hastily written review of my book by William M. Chace, in "Common Knowledge"

philpapers.org/rec/CHATUO-25
William M. Chace, The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall: Language, Memory, and Indigenous California - PhilPapers
This impressive book reveals the ferocity with which a present generation can bring charges against those of a past generation alleged to have committed errors. Alfred Kroeber, one of the most ...
philpapers.org
October 24, 2025 at 8:25 PM
andrewgarrett.bsky.social
Awesome passive-aggressive brackets! (The original failed to capitalize "Zeitgeist".)

Source: storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...
Text from a judicial opinion: "Similarly, in one of many, often repetitive, and laudatory (toward President Trump) but superfluous allegations, the pleader states, 'The Apprentice' represented the cultural magnitude of President Trump’s singular brilliance, which captured the [Z]eitgeist of our time."
September 19, 2025 at 6:05 PM
Reposted by Andrew Garrett
ursulakleguin.com
This fall brings not just one but two exhibitions about Ursula and her work.

In Portland, A Larger Reality: Ursula K. Le Guin opens October 31st at Oregon Contemporary.

In London, The Word for World: The Maps of Ursula K. Le Guin opens October 10th at the AA Gallery.
Ursula K. Le Guin, wearing a white button-down shirt, sits amid a pile of cushions, resting her head on her fist. Image by Marion Wood Kolisch | Courtesy Portland Art Museum
September 16, 2025 at 4:27 PM
andrewgarrett.bsky.social
www.nytimes.com/2025/09/15/w...
She Held Her Baby for an Hour. Then the State Took Her Away.
www.nytimes.com
September 16, 2025 at 4:09 AM
andrewgarrett.bsky.social
I'm very proud of this paper, now published in Anthropological Linguistics: "Alfred Kroeber’s Documentation of Inuktun (Polar Inuit)," a study of the earliest substantial documentation of Inuktun (NW Greenland) and what it shows about Inuit dialects and change.

muse.jhu.edu/pub/17/artic...
"1.Background. Few episodes in the history of American anthropology and linguistics are as disturbing as the treatment of six Inughuit (Polar Inuit) people brought from northern Greenland to New York City in 1897 at the behest of Franz Boas. Living in the world’s northernmost permanently inhabited place, later dubbed Thule by Knud Rasmussen, Inughuit people were objects of fascination for Americans and Europeans. This was partly due to their environment (with its three-and-a-half-month winter night and seven months of solid sea ice) and proximity to the North Pole, but also because of their apparent isolation. Inughuit people occupy “an island in an ocean of ice” (Gilberg 1984:577) and were thought to have been unaware of other people before the arrival of European explorers. In short, they were exemplars of the ethnographic fantasy of “uncontaminated” indigenes."
September 15, 2025 at 1:42 PM
andrewgarrett.bsky.social
"It is important to refuse the notion that this is just how things are right now, invoking a feckless realpolitik that justifies complicity with a brutal and rising authoritarianism."

www.chronicle.com/article/when...
Opinion | When Universities Become Informants
A practice from the McCarthy era makes an ugly return.
www.chronicle.com
September 14, 2025 at 1:49 AM
andrewgarrett.bsky.social
"[T]he decision to send the information to the Trump administration was made by the University of California’s systemwide general counsel. ... Berkeley’s counsel declined to share with [Judith] Butler the contents of the files."

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...
UC Berkeley shares 160 names with Trump administration in ‘McCarthy era’ move
Prominent professor Judith Butler among students and faculty investigated for ‘alleged antisemitic incidents’
www.theguardian.com
September 12, 2025 at 9:23 PM
Reposted by Andrew Garrett
mariazielenbach.bsky.social
In finally finished reading The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall by @andrewgarrett.bsky.social cover to cover and wooow, it's so good!
Big recommendation for all linguists, anthropologists, ethnologists, Ursula K. LeGuin fans and everyone else!
So many things 100% relevant to my work to reflect on
Cover of the book The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall: Language, Memory, and Indigenous California. Shows hands in blue latex gloves scratching off letters from a white wall
September 7, 2025 at 4:58 PM
Reposted by Andrew Garrett
number10cat.bsky.social
The most important news from today's reshuffle:
September 5, 2025 at 7:22 PM
andrewgarrett.bsky.social
www.bpr.org/2025-09-01/t...
This album of songs for Gaza is in Yiddish, a language nearly eradicated by genocide
People are responding to the humanitarian crisis in Gaza in many ways. Earlier this month, a fundraising album of songs for Gaza was released in Yiddish, a language nearly eradicated through genocide.
www.bpr.org
September 5, 2025 at 6:32 PM
Reposted by Andrew Garrett
linguistlist.bsky.social
Jobs: General Linguistics: Assistant Professor - Language Revitalization - Linguistics, University of California Berkeley
Jobs: General Linguistics: Assistant Professor - Language Revitalization - Linguistics, University of California Berkeley
Description: Assistant Professor - Language Revitalization - UC Berkeley   Position Description: The Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, has been authorized to make an appointment in Language Revitalization. The position will be filled at the rank of assistant professor (tenure-track). Duties will include teaching (up to three courses per year); undergraduate and graduate advising and supervision of student research; development of a successful and origin
dlvr.it
August 29, 2025 at 3:12 PM
Reposted by Andrew Garrett
nposegay.bsky.social
There will be many casualties from UChicago ending ('pausing') PhD admissions in Humantities, but one which I am keenly aware of: this is close to a death sentence for teaching cuneiform in the United States (esp. Sumerian, Hittite, Elamite, Eblaite, Luwian) and it will affect the whole world.
annetteyreed.bsky.social Annette Yoshiko Reed @annetteyreed.bsky.social · Aug 27
“Chicago has long helped to keep alive tiny fields & esoteric areas of humanistic study... Without the univ’s support, & the continued training of grad students who can keep these bodies of kn going, entire spheres of human learning might eventually blink out.” www.theatlantic.com/culture/arch...
If the University of Chicago Won’t Defend the Humanities, Who Will?
Why it matters that the University of Chicago is pausing admissions to doctoral programs in literature, philosophy, the arts, and languages
www.theatlantic.com
August 27, 2025 at 2:02 PM
Reposted by Andrew Garrett
jamellebouie.net
a thought i have reading @clintsmithiii.bsky.social’s wonderful piece is that one reason the administration wants to erase any mention of the worst of our past is because it is intent on recapitulating those atrocities www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...
Actually, Slavery Was Very Bad
The president’s latest criticism of museums is a thinly veiled attempt to erase Black history.
www.theatlantic.com
August 22, 2025 at 5:00 PM
andrewgarrett.bsky.social
My memory of Malcolm Margolin is of his generosity. Once, speaking of Leanne Hinton, he said, "She makes me proud to be a human being."
August 21, 2025 at 12:58 AM
andrewgarrett.bsky.social
Come be my colleague! UC Berkeley Linguistics has a tenure-track position in language revitalization.

aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05022
Assistant Professor - Language Revitalization - Linguistics
University of California, Berkeley is hiring. Apply now!
aprecruit.berkeley.edu
August 20, 2025 at 12:34 AM
Reposted by Andrew Garrett
drkatcarm.bsky.social
Another lovely Labov obit by @betsysneller.bsky.social @laurelmack.bsky.social and Meredith Tamminga. This one takes a birds eye view of how Labov has contributed to where the field is going, which is a nice forward-looking complement to Eckert's obit onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
Bill Labov: Looking Back, Looking Forward
Bill Labov passed away peacefully at home on December 17, 2024, with his wife and fellow Penn linguist Gillian Sankoff by his side. He leaves behind a legacy so large that it is hard to put into word....
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
August 8, 2025 at 3:07 PM
andrewgarrett.bsky.social
My Berkeley colleagues & I are saddened by the death of our colleague Robin Lakoff. Her 1972 book Language & Women's Place created the modern field of language & gender. She also wrote articulately, passionately & impactfully about Latin linguistics (Abstract Syntax & Latin Complementation, 1968) 1/
Robin Lakoff
August 6, 2025 at 12:46 AM
andrewgarrett.bsky.social
"Mary Gaillard, Who Broke a Ceiling in Subatomic Research, Dies at 86"

www.nytimes.com/2025/07/31/s...

Photo: "Mary K. Gaillard in 1985, four years after she became the first woman hired by the physics department at the University of California, Berkeley."
Mary Gaillard, Who Broke a Ceiling in Subatomic Research, Dies at 86
www.nytimes.com
August 2, 2025 at 5:34 PM
andrewgarrett.bsky.social
From Scott MacLochlainn, "Naming and Namelessness", Annual Review of Anthropology (@annualreviews.bsky.social‬)

www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...
"During the early part of the twentieth century, names seemed among the most stable topics that anthropologists could study. Numerous scholars such as Edward Sapir (1924), Elsie Clews Parsons (1937), and Alfred Kroeber (1909) all published works on naming; the latter subsequently provided a controversial eponym for the anthropology building at the University of California, Berkeley (Garrett 2023). Their motivations were multiple, if overlapping, in situating naming as a systematic, patterned, and accessible code for understanding cultural practices. Perhaps more dutiful than later literatures in producing inventories, glossaries, and lexical explications of names, such scholarship professed a fundamental importance of the name within social practices. To take just one text as an example from this era, Franz Boas’s (1934) Geographical Names of the Kwakiutl Indians describes how Kwakiutl naming practices allowed people to meaningfully orient them- selves to the spaces they inhabited, in addition to dutifully providing a glossary of names, their linguistic structures, and a set of topographic maps."
August 2, 2025 at 3:59 PM
andrewgarrett.bsky.social
Awesome new @diachronica.bsky.social article by @austronesianist.com: "Late Malayo-Polynesian: A new model of Austronesian linguistic relations"

www.jbe-platform.com/content/jour...
"Late Malayo-Polynesian: A new model of Austronesian linguistic relations", abstract: "Models of higher-order Austronesian linguistic relations have traditionally involved the grouping of languages into large higher-order subgroups. In the Malayo-Polynesian subgroup, that tradition has led to the creation of subgroups covering great geographical distances all modeled as descending directly from the Malayo-Polynesian node. This research argues that the evidence for those large subgroups does not stand under scrutiny. Rather, the distribution of innovations throughout the Malayo-Polynesian region suggests that those innovations spread within a large network of dialects. That network, here dubbed the “Late-Malayo-Polynesian” network, replaces discrete higher-level nodes in the classical model of Austronesian linguistic relations."
August 1, 2025 at 11:57 PM
andrewgarrett.bsky.social
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
I spent decades at Columbia. I’m withdrawing my fall course due to its deal with Trump | Rashid Khalidi
The university’s draconian policies and new definition of antisemitism make much teaching impossible
www.theguardian.com
August 1, 2025 at 12:59 PM
Reposted by Andrew Garrett
drkatcarm.bsky.social
Absolutely beautiful obituary for Bill Labov, describing a life rich in insights and in humanity www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
William (Bill) Labov (1927–2024) | Language in Society | Cambridge Core
William (Bill) Labov (1927–2024) - Volume 54 Issue 3
www.cambridge.org
July 31, 2025 at 2:52 PM
Reposted by Andrew Garrett
opalescentopal.bsky.social
With Tom Lehrer's passing, I suppose this is a moment to share the story of the prank he played on the National Security Agency, and how it went undiscovered for nearly 60 years.
July 27, 2025 at 9:01 PM