April 2026 | Confessions of a Language Junkie, Professor Pam Munro

After previously joining us for the “Slang at UCLA and Beyond” program, Professor Pamela Munro returns to host a new talk exploring her lifelong fascination with languages! Professor Munro, a Distinguished Research Professor of Linguistics at University of California, Los Angeles, has conducted fieldwork on more than 30 languages, primarily Indigenous languages of the Americas. Her research has taken her to communities in California, Arizona, Oklahoma, Oaxaca, and Belize, as well as to Los Angeles—home to one of the most linguistically diverse populations in the world. Over the course of her career, she has introduced generations of UCLA undergraduate and graduate students to the insights that come from working directly with native speakers. She has also been deeply involved in making language documentation accessible to broader communities beyond academia. Professor Munro has never met a language that didn’t have fascinating features, and she shared some of her favorites in this engaging lecture.