UP Department of Linguistics

We’re Hiring!
Open Position: PROJECT STAFF

Education Experience
Completion of 2 years of studies in college
with knowledge in MS Office -- Word, Excel and Power point

Training No training required

Eligibility Career Service (Sub-Professional)/First Level Eligibility

Additional Details Competency:
Core (Basic) Exemplifying Integrity and Professionalism; Delivering
Service Excellence; Demonstrating Personal Effectiveness; Teamwork and Collaboration

Duties and Responsibilities
Conduct archival work by examining all records in the storage area
Scan all existing records in paper form into digital format
Create a database containing all the information in the scanned documents
Ensure that the existing records will be categorized properly after the digitization of records
Perform other tasks assigned by the College Secretary

Send your PDS , Certificate of Eligibility and TOR to: [email protected]

Deadline of Submission: June 15, 2026, Monday

ELAR is excited to announce the release of Lameta 3.0.18, the latest version of our metadata creation tool.

The new version introduces

Multilingual metadata fields, making it easier to create and manage bilingual or multilingual metadata
A search functionality, allowing users to search across their metadata.

You can download Lameta via this link:

🔗https://sites.google.com/site/metadatatooldiscussion/home

If you have not used Lameta before, now is a great time to start. You can learn more through the tutorials and guides available on the ELAR website at:

🔗http://hdl.handle.net/2196/4dd4776a-7cb1-453b-8f2a-9880e40ced19

/// When adults teach children something new, words are only part of the story. A new cross-cultural study shows that adults from different cultures instinctively modify their gestures in similar ways to help children learn, suggesting that spontaneous human teaching may rely on a shared, deeply rooted communicative strategy.

[Emanuela Campisi (University of Catania) and Anita Slominska and Asli Ozyurek (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics)] found that although Italian adults used more gestures overall than Dutch adults, both groups increased the use of visually rich, two-handed gestures when demonstrating unfamiliar logic puzzles to children.

[...] The researchers asked 16 Italian and 16 Dutch adults to demonstrate two novel logic puzzles to two different audiences: 9–10-year-old children and other adults. The two groups were chosen because previous research suggests Italians come from a more "gesture-rich" culture, while Dutch speakers tend to use fewer representational gestures overall.

As expected, Italian participants produced more representational gestures than Dutch participants across the demonstrations. However, neither group simply increased the total number of gestures when speaking to children. Instead, both groups changed the type of gestures they used.

Across both cultures, adults used significantly more two-handed representational gestures when teaching children. Researchers believe these gestures increase iconicity, making explanations more visually informative and easier for children to understand.

The findings suggest that adults instinctively adapt demonstrations to make abstract or unfamiliar information clearer for younger audiences.

[...] The study also examined "bracketed gestures," in which one hand remains still while the other moves. Dutch adults used these gestures more frequently when explaining puzzles to other adults, possibly to help organize and anchor information during communication. Italians used them less often in adult-directed demonstrations.

However, when speaking to children, both groups converged on similar rates of bracketed gestures: another sign that adults across cultures may rely on common pedagogical instincts when teaching young learners.

[...] Researchers say the findings help illuminate how humans pass knowledge across generations: a process considered central to cultural evolution. By combining speech with gestures and other visual signals, adults create what researchers describe as "multimodal scaffolding," a flexible communication system tailored to learners' needs.

The team hopes future studies will explore a wider range of cultures and teaching situations, while also examining how different gestural strategies affect children's actual learning and comprehension. ///

Italians and Dutch share the same gestural instinct for teaching, research reveals Italians are famous for speaking with their hands. But a new international study suggests that when it comes to teaching children, adults everywhere instinctively become more expressive with their gestures—even in cultures known for gesturing less.

ELDP is hosting its annual grantee training in language documentation and archiving from June 3 to June 10, 2026.

The training will take place at the Humboldt Forum in Berlin. Mandana Seyfeddinipur, Kelsey Neely, Pierpaolo di Carlo and Shuan Karim will train the new grantees in the theory, methods, and best practices of language documentation.

We’re looking forward to a week of learning, sharing, and connecting!

ETHNOGRAPHY OF SPEAKING THE BIKOL FOLK SONG
Ni Cynthia D. Nolasco
1998

Wika at Pagpapalaya: Mga Papel ng Ika-8ng Konggreso ng Linggwistiks sa Pilipinas

[EXCERPT]

An observer in the Bikol region will immediately note the closeness of ties between daily life and song among the people. The folk sing at work, while resting, at play and in worship. They sing when they are happy, when they are disappointed or heartbroken, when they are afraid, and when they are penitent. They sing to their babies, the older children, to their lovers, their parents, to God and the saints. There are songs sung before dawn, during the day, in the evenings and at midnight. There is a vast and varied repertoire of melodies and lyrics upon which the people draw for songs to suit both occasion and purpose for which singing is appropriate…

… Hence, we see that folksinging in the region happens under a host of diverse conditions. The folk sing their songs in a variety of social situations and settings, with a variety of singers and for a variety of purposes. However diverse these conditions are, the folk implicitly know which song and which singing style accompany which purpose, which occasion, which physical setting, which time of day, which type of singer or singers and audience, and other such elements which, broadly speaking, constitute the folksinging context. Complementarily, the folk also know which elements do not match or combine…

… These examples of appropriate and inappropriate behavior indicate that folksinging is not merely the act of singing songs transmitted over time but rather a complex activity involving a “correct” text, context, participants and performance and a “correct” combination of these elements. It is a form of behavior involving choices on these components which are made, often unconsciously, by the folk.

Broadly defined, folk songs are the songs of, for, and by the folk which is “any group of people whatsoever who share at least one common factor (such as) occupation, language or religion” (Dundes 1965: 2). These are the melodies and lyrics as well as their performance which are created and/or recreated by the folk, performed primarily by and among themselves to accompany the daily life of the community, and the expressive of a meaningful personal or social or group experience.

The specific defining characteristics of folk songs are communal recreation, variation, aural transmission, and performance in small groups. Communal recreation is the basic element which distinguishes folk songs from other types of songs. While originally composed by individuals, folk songs have been and are acted on, re-created and re-fashioned by the community in a process of purposeful selection and adaptation, unlike popular songs which are taken over ready-made by them. Thus folk songs are truly a communal product and possession.

Consequently, they exist only as variants of the original compositions whose melodies and/or lyrics, together with their authors, are now perhaps forgotten. While popular songs are congealed in form, folk songs invite variation in their tunes and their words…

… The ethnography of speaking the Bikol folk song is a description and analysis of its text, context and performance and the shared conventions governing its conduct and interpretation. It is a description and analysis of the rules governing the use of the folk song in the Bikol region, the rules and conventions governing its form, its doing and performance, and setting which are intimately related to the rules governing its means of interpretation. There are shared conventions that distinguish it from other nonfolklore communicative modes, that is, through its text, its conduct or performance, and the situation where it may be found.

To produce, comprehend and use “correct and well-formed, contextually appropriate” folk songs, the folk draw on what might be termed their folksinging competence, an implicit knowledge of the rules and conventions involving the text, performance and context of this verbal art.

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Kindly send an email to the editorial team at to request for a copy of the article.
For more information about this series of The Archive excerpts, you may read .

Scholars interested in contributing articles to the journal may visit for additional details or email the Managing Editor at .

𝐆𝐀𝐖𝐀𝐃 𝐒𝐖𝐅 𝐍𝐚𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐘𝐮𝐧𝐢𝐭 𝐧𝐚 𝐓𝐚𝐠𝐚𝐩𝐚𝐠𝐭𝐚𝐠𝐮𝐲𝐨𝐝 𝐧𝐠 𝐖𝐢𝐤𝐚𝐧𝐠 𝐅𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐩𝐢𝐧𝐨, bukás na sa mga nominasyon!

Bukás ito sa pagsusumite ng mga opisina at kolehiyo sa UP Diliman para sa mga yunit na nagtataguyod ng wikang Filipino.

Ang hihiranging Gawad SWF Natatanging Yunit na Tagapagtaguyod ng Wikang Filipino ay makatatanggap ng tropeo at premyong PHP 60,000.

Para sa anumang paglilinaw, maaaring makipag-ugnayan kay Gng. Elfrey V. Paterno sa pamamagitan ng email na .

Layunin ng 𝗚𝗔𝗪𝗔𝗗 𝗦𝗪𝗙 na bigyang-parangal ang mga pagsisikap sa pagsusulong at pagpapaunlad ng wikang Filipino bilang intelektuwalisadong wika ng pagtuturo, saliksik, publikasyon, malikhaing produksiyon, at opisyal na komunikasyon. Gayundin, paraan ito upang hikayatin ang komunidad ng UP na magturo, manaliksik, at magsulat sa wikang Filipino.

Visiting Research Fellow (VRF) Jillian Louise Melchor spent four months in the Philippines to document its Spanish contact varieties also known as Chabacano. The following is an excerpt from her report:

"From October 2025 to February 2026, I joined the UP Department of Linguistics as a Visiting Research Fellow. I am a doctoral researcher investigating decolonial paradigms for the scholarship and preservation of creole languages, with particular focus on the Chabacano varieties of the Philippines. Alongside my doctoral research, I am part of the Sustainable Language Documentation project funded by the University of Helsinki and the Kone Foundation, led by my supervisor, Prof. Eeva Sippola. [...]"

To read more about this entry of the VRF Reports, visit .

Visiting Research Fellow’s Report: Jillian Louise Melchor - Department of Linguistics - UP Diliman From October 2025 to February 2026, I joined the UP Department of Linguistics as a Visiting Research Fellow. I am a doctoral researcher investigating decolonial paradigms for the scholarship and preservation of creole languages, with particular focus on the Chabacano varieties of the Philippines. Al...

/// [T]echnologies such as automatic speech recognition convert spoken language into text. Transcription is often presented as a straightforward technical exercise: you listen, you write down what was said.

But every transcription protocol carries within it assumptions about what standardised speech looks like. In the words of linguist Mary Bucholtz, “all transcripts take sides.”

In practice, the standardised language is almost always the “prestige dialect” of powerful institutions. For English, that may be the variety used in the Oxford English Dictionary or by the BBC.

Recent research from Cornell University and Carnegie Mellon shows what this means in concrete terms.

When people watched a video presentation with automatically generated, error-prone subtitles, they consistently rated the speaker as less clear and less knowledgeable than viewers who saw the same presentation with accurate captions. The quality of the transcription affected not only how viewers perceived the speaker, but also the content of the talk.

The stakes are particularly high for First Nations people in Australia. Here, the mismatch between the conventions of transcription and the actual practice of communication can be severe.

In many Indigenous communities, pauses and silences themselves function as meaningful acts of communication.

In places such as Wadeye in Australia’s Northern Territory, a sustained silence is not a gap to be filled. Instead it is part of the structure of what is being communicated.

Transcription systems developed in northern hemisphere academic contexts will generally render those silences with hesitation markers, ellipses, or editorial cuts, stripping out meaning.

Common words in languages other than English (such as “Boorloo” for Perth) go unrecognised. They may be mistranscribed to fit the language models on which technology is trained.

In legal, medical and welfare contexts, transcription can determine someone’s liberty, diagnosis, or entitlements. Here, systematic misrepresentation of non-standardised language is a justice issue.

[...] Making things better includes developing more diverse models for automated speech recognition.

But for anyone producing transcripts right now – in journalism, oral history, the law, clinical records, or sociolinguistic research – certain obligations apply. Make your conventions explicit, acknowledge what your system cannot represent, and resist the impulse to normalise speech into something legible to an imagined standard reader.

Rendering speech into writing may seem natural, but writing is itself a technology. The task is not to achieve perfect objectivity, but to be visible and accountable for decisions about what is included and excluded, and how those decisions are made. ///

Transcribing speech is never neutral. It shapes power and bias Automated speech recognition is a powerful tool – but it comes with a host of assumptions.

SUMMER SEMINAR IN LINGUISTICS (SSL) on Language Documentation

Today marks the 5th and final day of the SSL on Language Documentation held at the CSSP Health and Wellness Center. This installment of the SSL focuses on equiping the participants with the necessary skills for conducting their language documentation projects. The final day features the modules on validation, mobilization, and grant applications by Instr. Brian Salvador Baran and on language documentation in the Philippines by Instr. John Michael Vincent De Pano. This SSL on Language Documentation concludes with participants drawing up their plans for language documentation, reflecting on their own field practices, and building lasting networks with fellow participants.

To learn more about the SSL, read on at .

Warmest congratulations to our BA Lingg majors on winning during the recently concluded 2026 UP Korean Speech Contest and Hapon and On and On and On!

For more information on our Asian language programs, please visit .