Bos del puevlo, bos del syelo. / The voice of the people is the voice of heaven.
-Ladino refran
Julia Peck
she/her/hers
Welcome, glad you're here! I'm a linguist in training as well as a writer and organizer.
I'm currently a PhD student at the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. I primarily work on language revitalization — the process by which a speaker community reclaims and revives a language in decline. I am dedicated to working in support of the revitalization movement for Ladino (Judeo-Spanish), the language of the Sephardic Jews.
I'm also interested in minoritized languages from the angles of sociolinguistics and language contact. My MPhil (Masters) dissertation examined the morphosyntactic integration of borrowings in Istanbul Judeo-Spanish.
At Berkeley, I'm proud to be a member of the Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley (SLaB), the Language Revitalization Working Group, and the Language as Social Justice Working Group.
Below are some questions that keep me up at night on the linguistics front. Reach out to me at julia (dot) peck (at) berkeley (dot) edu if you like to think about these too.
Things I think about
How can linguists best serve and collaborate with minoritized speaker communities? How do we move away from the extractive models our discipline once relied on?
How do speaker communities treat borrowings and other results of language contact as they work to revitalize their languages? How do they integrate them linguistically?
How do language revitalization movements overlap with other anti-oppression movements in a community, like the struggle for land rights, political sovereignty, and economic and environmental justice?
Things I've been up to recently
Being named a Berkeley Language Center Fellow for Spring 2025!
Spending Spring 2024 as a Graduate Student Researcher with Prof. Andrew Garrett on Yurok language documentation and revitalization projects. One mini-project has been preparing the transcription and publication of multiple recordings of Yurok sentences spoken by elder Florence Shaughnessy.
Working on an at-home language nesting kit for Ladino — a resource inspired by the amazing revitalization work of the Puyallup Tribe — which will support speakers and learners to use more Ladino at home. My summer 2023 prep work with speakers in Istanbul was generously supported by the UC Berkeley Department of Linguistics, the Andrew Mellon grant, and the Sultan Program of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. It's currently being piloted by the students in Berkeley's first-ever Ladino course. Stay tuned for the final product, which will come in the form of a physical kit, a website, and hopefully an app!
Attending NWAV (New Ways of Analyzing Variation), the largest sociolinguistics conference in the U.S., in New York City in October 2023. There, I presented a Project Launch poster on a new study on Galician with Antón de la Fuente of Stanford.
Attending HIGA, the Summit of Young Speakers of Minoritized Languages, as a delegate in July 2023 in Gasteiz, Euskadi (Basque Country).
Talking with California magazine about Ladino! Scroll to the bottom to hear a lovely recording of Morenika, a classic Ladino song.