diff --git a/.github/workflows/ci.yml b/.github/workflows/ci.yml
index 56e817d..3ba3c2a 100644
--- a/.github/workflows/ci.yml
+++ b/.github/workflows/ci.yml
@@ -14,4 +14,9 @@ jobs:
         with:
           enable-cache: true
       - run: uv sync --frozen
+      # same NLTK pre-warm as the Dockerfile: g2p-en needs the tagger
+      # under both its old and new (nltk>=3.9) names
+      - run: |
+          uv run python -c "import nltk;
+          [nltk.download(p, quiet=True) for p in ('averaged_perceptron_tagger','averaged_perceptron_tagger_eng','cmudict')]"
       - run: uv run pytest