Julian Vargo
PhD Student in Hispanic Linguistics
Department of Spanish & Portuguese
University of California, Berkeley
Embedded Files
I am a Hispanic Linguistics PhD student and researcher in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese at the University of California, Berkeley. My work generally relates to phonetics, phonology, language revitalization, language contact, and sociolinguistics. I work on vowels, vowel dispersion, suprasegmental phonetics, and vocalic timing of several languages, such as Spanish, Catalan, Ladino, and Kalaallisut.
I am currently serving as a graduate student researcher for the Multilingual Hispanic Speech in California Corpus. I'm the co-coordinator for UC Berkeley's Ladino/Judeo-Spanish Working Group, and a researcher at the Script Encoding Initiative. I also work independently as a college admissions consultant.
My research interests are in:
Vowel Phonetics
Prosody & Suprasegmentals
Phonetics-phonology interface
Sociolinguistics
Language Contact
Language Revitalization
A 3d spectrogram and moving spectral slice of my name!
Current Projects
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.
Right: Hispanic Californian English vowel trajectories of 163 speakers and 800,000 vowels
Multidimensional Vowel Dispersion as a Cue to Stylistic Variation
NWAV 53, November 2025, University of Michigan
Vowel dispersion is a wonderful 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
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 a less typical timing metric, examining 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!
Right: Timing of vowel maximum of 139 bilingual speakers speaking both English and Spanish in two sociolinguistic interviews. 1.5 million vowels analyzed
Asymmetrical Reinforcement of Nasalized Vowels in Spanish-English Bilinguals
Hispanic Linguistics Symposium, November 2025, University of Arizona
A study measuring the acoustical differences of antiicipatory 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)
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 vowel phonetics
I am currently leading a paper on Kalaallisut vocalic variation with Naomi Schroeter (UC Berkeley) and Frans Petersen (University of Greenland). Please email me for a draft manuscript.
Left: Vowel space of Kalaallisut, /a a: i i: u u:/
Fleisig, Eve, Julian Vargo, Nikolai Andrés Schwarz-Acosta, Veronica Ivonne Grajeda, Abigail Roberts, Rhosean Asmah, and Nicole Holliday. (Forthcoming). Identity and Personality in the Social Perception of Synthesized Voices: Perceptions of OpenAI's Text-to-Speech Technology. Phonetica.
Ladino linguistic infrastructure development
Thanks to Berkeley's Center for Jewish Studies, I've been able to build a Ladino Keyboard and Montreal Forced Alignment model for Ladino (aka Judeo-Spanish). Thank you to my research assistants, Naomi Schroeter and Abe Ezra. See the linguistics software page for more!
Vargo, Julian (2025). Onset of Nasalization [Computer Program]
I am currently developing a program that automatically measures the onset of anticipatory vowel nasalization, based on the timing of maximum velopharyngeal velocity (Carignan 2021). The script utilizes cues as described in Styler (2017) and Pruthi & Espy-Wilson (2004 & 2007), amongst others. An abridged, fully functional, draft version of the Praat script is available on my GitHub. Current work includes improving the measurement accuracy of acoustical cues, implementing speaker-specific nasal-learning models to improve accuracy, and creating a Python-based GUI for a desktop program.
Script Encoding Initiative
Since September 2025, I've been a part-time researcher for the Script Encoding Initiative. I'm currently documenting the history of computer support for the world's writing systems. Stay tuned for future research and blog posts on the SEI website.
Multilingual Hispanic Speech in California Corpus (Fall 2023-Present)
Since August 2023, I've been the lead graduate student researcher for the MuHSiC corpus. My work primarily involves streamlining corpus processing and managing undergraduate researchers. I've developed a number of programs, workflows, and guides to handle large amounts of speech and process it into useable data.
Data Visualization in R for Linguists
I am creating a copy-paste graphing guide in R, specifically tailored for linguistics research. No previous coding experience required.
Recent Work
Vargo, Julian (2025). Introduction to Ladino/Judeo-Spanish Speech and Text Corpora: Resources, Processing, and Analysis [Workshop]
Ladino/Judeo-Spanish Working Group - October 2025 - Slides Here
Vargo, Julian (2025). Evidence for the Effect of Visual Input on L2-Learner Vowel Production [Conference Talk]
Linguistic Society of America Annual Conference - January 2025 - Paper Here
Vargo, Julian (2025). Orthographic Variation of Ladino Vowels. [Working Group Talk]
Ladino/Judeo-Spanish Working Group.
March 2025 - Paper Here
When I'm not working, I'm particularly drawn to the outdoors, and love to hike, mountain climb, camp, fish, and do distance running.
I've also become quite the expert at berry picking! I'm a connoisseur of anything that grows on a berry bush: wild huckleberries, thimbleberries, salmonberries, salal, or lemonade berries. I'm particularly good at picking and identifying berries anywhere on the North American West Coast, from San Diego to Vancouver.
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