Julian Vargo
PhD Student in Hispanic Linguistics
Department of Spanish & Portuguese | University of California, Berkeley
Embedded Files
I'm a Hispanic Linguistics PhD student and researcher in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese at the University of California, Berkeley. My work is on phonetics, phonology, language revitalization, language contact, and sociolinguistics. I work on acoustic phonetics, vowel dispersion, suprasegmental phonetics, and vocalic timing of several languages, such as Spanish, Catalan, Ladino, and Kalaallisut.
I am the project manager of the Multilingual Hispanic Speech in California Corpus, the manager of the UC Berkeley Sociolinguistics Lab, the co-coordinator for UC Berkeley's Ladino/Judeo-Spanish Working Group, and a researcher at the Script Encoding Initiative.
Current Projects
The MuHSiC Corpus is now live! muhsic.ucsc.edu
I'm the project manager for Multilingual Hispanic Speech in California corpus. I manage corpus processing, forced-alignment, undergraduate researcher training, storage and web development. This corpus features 600 multilinguals speaking English and Spanish for 350 hours each (700 hours total). TextGrid alignments, audio, and metadata are available online.
Suprasegmental and Vocalic Variation in Ladino
Linguistic Society of America Annual Meeting, January 2026, New Orleans
Dipthongization, nasalization, and rhythmic timing in Ladino. Coauthored with Naomi Schroeter (UC Berkeley)
Anticipatory Vowel Nasalization in Catalan
Linguistic Society of America Annual Meeting, January 2026, New Orleans
An acoustical study suggesting that Catalan has allophonic anticipatory vowel nasalization, similarly to English.
Kalaallisut vocalic variation with Naomi Schroeter (UC Berkeley) and Frans Petersen (University of Greenland).
Left: Vowel space of Kalaallisut, /a a: i i: u u:/
Acoustical Diphthongal Trajectory Variation in Hispanic Californian English
NWAV 53, November 2025, University of Michigan
How does language dominance and bilingualism affect the trajectories of vowels? Does greater Spanish dominance make for larger or shorter diphthongs? Results show that dominance in one language over another doesn't uniformly affect the entire vowel space.
Left: Hispanic Californian English vowel trajectories of 163 speakers and 800,000 vowels
Asymmetrical Reinforcement of Nasalized Vowels in Spanish-English Bilinguals
Hispanic Linguistics Symposium, November 2025, University of Arizona
A study measuring the acoustical differences of anticipatory vowel nasalization in Spanish. Breathiness is an available secondary cue of nasality in English, but is not an available cue in Spanish. Coauthored with Tyler Thornley (Univ. Colorado, Boulder)
Timing of Vocalic Articulatory Maxima in Spanish-English Bilinguals
Hispanic Linguistics Symposium, November 2025, University of Arizona
Prosody is often a matter of timing: syllable duration, speech rate, and pitch accent timing. This study examines when the tongue hits the peak articulation of a vowel, when formant movement is at its global minimum. It turns out that tongue timing is language-specific!
Multidimensional Vowel Dispersion as a Cue to Stylistic Variation
NWAV 53, November 2025, University of Michigan
Vowel dispersion is a strong indicator of style shifting. In this study, I develop two new flavors of measuring vowel dispersion. Coauthored with Akul Shivkumar.
Left: Dispersion contours for discourse analysis & 3D vocalic convex hull of the same dataset
Vowel Nasalization in Romanian
LSRL, May 2026, Michigan State University
Romanian equally utilizes both anticipatory and trailing vowel nasalization in NV and VN sequences. F1 & F2 bandwidth, F0, and A1-P1 are the strongest nasal acoustic correlates, showing that the many commonly used acoustic cues are not the most informative for Romanian. Nasalization causes previously undocumented synchronic shifts to Romanian vowel quality.
Left: Romanian Nasalization Curves, based on methods from Carignan (2023)
When I'm not working, I'm particularly drawn to the outdoors, and love to hike, mountain climb, camp, fish, and do distance running.
Report abuse