The 50th anniversary of Abralin, the Brazilian linguistics society met May 1-9  in Maceio Brazil with courses, workshops, keynote lectures and 2000 participants.   UMass participants included: Andries Coetzee, Tom Roeper, Suzi Lima and Umass Visitors: Sabrina Lopez,  Marcus Maia

Andries Coetzee gave a Keynote lecture on “Individual vs. Community Variation in Phonetics and Phonology”

Tom Roeper gave a Keynote lecture on: “The connection between Recursion and Mathematics and its prospects  in pedagogy ”                               And he gave a course on using acquisitiion materials in schools together with Marcus Maia.

Suzi Lima (with Tonjes Veenstra) held a session on “Complexity in indigenous languages” which illustrated embedding in half a dozen languages and several language families.

In addition: Noam Chomsky, Geoff Pullum, and Dan Everett among others gave Keynote lextures–there were large crowds and some spirited discussion about recursion in indigenous languages (between Dan Everett and Tom Roeper).

In addition, there was a special session on Linguistics and Resistance in which the rise of fascism and connections to universities was discussed and action urged. This occurred  in response to attacks by President Bolsanaro on the universities and the announced 1/3 cutbacks on public universities, with potential immediate impact on a number of participants. There was a political demonstration and chants of “Lula Livre” (freedom for Lula) and people were very glad to hear of 800 universities (led by Harvard, the Sorbonne, and Cambridge) who expressed support for Philosophy and Sociology depts. in Brazil which had been directly attacked.