Boz del puevlo, boz del syelo. / The voice of the people is the voice of heaven.
-Ladino refran
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Julia Peck
she/her/hers
Welcome, glad you're here!
I'm a PhD candidate in 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 the creator of Ladino en Kaza, a resource to support people to build language nests for Ladino in their homes.
I'm also interested in minoritized languages from the angles of sociolinguistics and language contact. My MPhil (Masters) dissertation at the University of Oxford examined the morphosyntactic integration of borrowings into Istanbul Judeo-Spanish.
At Berkeley, I'm proud to be a co-founder of the Ladino/Judeo-Spanish Working Group (we are famous for the quality of our snacks), former co-coordinator of the Language Revitalization Working Group, member of the Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley (SLaB), and an advisory board member of the Berkeley Language Center.
Below are some general 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.
Cover photo: a young pomegranate growing in a garden in Kuzguncuk, Istanbul
Things I think about
Things I think about
How can linguistics best inform and work towards the goals of minoritized language communities? How do we move away from the extractive models our discipline once relied on?
How can linguistics best inform and work towards the goals of minoritized language communities? How do we move away from the extractive models our discipline once relied on?
→ What this looks like for me so far: serving as a Linguistic Partner at Breath of Life Archival Institute for Indigenous California Languages (2024 and 2026, Salinan), centering applied methodologies for revitalization and reclamation in my academic work, doing robust consultation before and throughout revitalization projects that I work on.
→ What this looks like for me so far: serving as a Linguistic Partner at Breath of Life Archival Institute for Indigenous California Languages (2024 and 2026, Salinan), centering applied methodologies for revitalization and reclamation in my academic work, doing robust consultation before and throughout revitalization projects that I work on.
What language revitalization and reclamation tools can we develop that are effective and fulfilling for learners and address some of the root causes of language shift and loss?
What language revitalization and reclamation tools can we develop that are effective and fulfilling for learners and address some of the root causes of language shift and loss?
→ What this looks like for me so far: creating home language nesting resources for Ladino (Ladino en Kaza), receiving mentorship from Dr. Leanne Hinton and Dr. Zalmai Zahir (Lushootseed), earning a Designated Emphasis in Indigenous Language Revitalization in addition to the PhD in Linguistics, participating in a worldwide network of young language revitalization practitioners through HIGA (Association for Young Speakers of Minoritized Languages)
→ What this looks like for me so far: creating home language nesting resources for Ladino (Ladino en Kaza), receiving mentorship from Dr. Leanne Hinton and Dr. Zalmai Zahir (Lushootseed), earning a Designated Emphasis in Indigenous Language Revitalization in addition to the PhD in Linguistics, participating in a worldwide network of young language revitalization practitioners through HIGA (Association for Young Speakers of Minoritized Languages)
How do user/speaker communities treat variation and results of language contact (borrowings, etc.) as they work to revitalize their languages? How do they integrate them linguistically?
How do user/speaker communities treat variation and results of language contact (borrowings, etc.) as they work to revitalize their languages? How do they integrate them linguistically?
→ What this looks like for me so far: an MPhil dissertation on the morphosyntactic integration of Turkish and French borrowings into Istanbul Judeo-Spanish (2019), a quantitative analysis of the effect of language contact on the Judeo-Spanish grammatical gender system (2025), a project on the use of Balkan versus Turkish dialectal features in contemporary written Ladino (2026)
→ What this looks like for me so far: an MPhil dissertation on the morphosyntactic integration of Turkish and French borrowings into Istanbul Judeo-Spanish (2019), a quantitative analysis of the effect of language contact on the Judeo-Spanish grammatical gender system (2025), a project on the use of Balkan versus Turkish dialectal features in contemporary written Ladino (2026)
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?
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?
→ What this looks like for me so far: working as a Graduate Student Researcher on a project where the Yurok Tribe requested transcription and translation of an archival recording of the creation story of water, in tandem with the Tribe's contemporary environmental justice struggle to remove dams along the Klamath River that runs through the heart of their territory
→ What this looks like for me so far: working as a Graduate Student Researcher on a project where the Yurok Tribe requested transcription and translation of an archival recording of the creation story of water, in tandem with the Tribe's contemporary environmental justice struggle to remove dams along the Klamath River that runs through the heart of their territory
Things I've been up to recently
Giving talks at the Cambridge Conference on Language Endangerment about dialectal variation in Ladino (see my slides) and HIGA (Association for Young Minority Language Speakers)'s 2026 alumni conference!
Publishing a book review of Ladino on the Internet: Sepharad 4 by Carlos Yebra López in the Journal of Jewish Languages.
Winning an Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award for 2025-2026! This is an award recognizing teaching among graduate students at UC Berkeley.
Teaching a Ladino 1 course through New Lehrhaus, California's hub for adult Jewish education. This is the first Ladino class in New Lehrhaus history!
Winning an Oswalt Grant to document naturalistic conversation in Ladino in Seattle in summer 2026 — and then going there and doing it!
Getting to teach the Elementary Judeo-Spanish course (JS 102/SPAN 109A) at UC Berkeley. I have 18 (l'chaim!) lovely undergrads in my class.
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