#protolinguist

Looking to teach yourself linguistics? Mutual Intelligibility was a year-long project to help curate free linguistics resources online for people who are trying to teach or learn linguistics, and now all of its posts are collected here for you. 

Crash Course Linguistics

A structured introduction to linguistics. Each post contains a 10-12 minute video from Crash Course Linguistics, plus supporting resources on the same topic including exercises with answer keys. 

Week 0 - Preview

Week 1 - Introduction

Week 2 - Morphology

Week 3 - Morphosyntax

Week 4 - Syntax

Week 5 - Semantics

Week 6 - Pragmatics

Week 7 - Sociolinguistics

Week 8 - Phonetics, Consonants

Week 9 - Phonetics, Vowels

Week 10 - Phonology

Week 11 - Psycholinguistics

Week 12 - Language acquisition

Week 13 - Historical linguistics and language change

Week 14 - Languages around the world

Week 15 - Computational linguistics

Week 16 - Writing systems

Resource Guides

Longer, more comprehensive guides to a few common intro linguistics topics. 

Introduction to IPA Consonants - Resource Guide 1

Introduction to IPA Vowels - Resource Guide 2

Introduction to Morphology - Resource Guide 3

Introduction to Constituency - Resource Guide 4

Introduction to World Englishes - Resource Guide 5

Introduction to Languages around the World - Resource Guide 6

3 Links Posts

Quick highlights of three relevant links about a specific topic, with a short description for each. 

3 Links about Linguistics Teaching

3 Links for Second Year Syntax Videos

3 Links for Second Year Phonology

3 Links for Natural Language Processing

3 Links for Semantics and Pragmatics

3 Links for Sociolinguistics

3 Links for Second Year Psycholinguistics

3 Links for Field Methods

3 Links for Articulatory Phonetics

3 Links for Writing Systems

3 Links for Gesture Studies

3 Links for Linguistics Communication (lingcomm)

3 Links for Evidentiality

3 Links for Linguistic Discrimination

3 Links for Linguistics Careers Outside Academia

3 Links for Schwa

3 Links for the Linguistics of Emoji

3 Links for Proto-Indo-European

3 Links for Second Language Acquisition

3 Links for Zero Morphemes

3 Links for Internet Linguistics

3 Links for Language Revitalization

Hi guys! It's been a while! So I actually went to the Dâw community in Brazil this summer after my first year at UT Austin to do fieldwork. It has taken me a while but I just realized that some proto-linguists might be interested to know what it was like to be in the field, especially as an undergrad. So please, ask me any questions you have!

With so many more major films and TV shows using constructed languages to build realistic and novel worlds, constructed languages are a great way to teach people about how language works.

David Adger and Coppe van Urk at Queen Mary University London ran a week conlanging course for year 10 students (~15 year olds). The students were introduced to phonetics, phonology, morphology, as well as word order, agreement and case (syntax). They also created a script for their language.

David has written about the course on his blog. It sounds like the students really took to it:

The work that the students did was amazing. We had languages with only VC(C) syllable structures, including phonological rules to delete initial vowels under certain circumstances; writing systems designed to match the technology and history of the speakers (including ox-plough (boustrophedon) systems that zigzagged back and forth across the page); languages where word order varied depending on the gender of the speaker; partial infixed reduplication for paucal with full reduplication for plural; writing systems adapted to be maximally efficient in how to represent reduplication (the students loved reduplication!); circumfixal tense marking with incorporated directionals; independent tense markers appearing initially in verb-initial orders, and a whole ton of other, linguistically extremely cool, features. The most impressive aspect of this, for me at least, was just how creative and engaged the students were in taking quite abstract concepts and using them to invent their language.

The students looked at conlangs including Tolkien’s Sindarin, Peterson‘s Dothraki, Okrand’s Klingon, David’s Warig, Nolan‘s Parseltongue, and various others. They even had a guest lecture from Francis Nolan on Parseltongue, which he created for the Harry Potter films!

David also shared the summary posters that the students made for their language. Here’s one of my favourites:

Crash Course Linguistics Preview

I’m excited to announce that the teaser trailer for Crash Course Linguistics is now up, and the following 16 full-length videos will be coming out around this time on Fridays for the next few months! 

Welcome to Crash Course Linguistics! Linguistics is everywhere and is super useful for pretty much everyone. Over 16 episodes, Taylor Behnke will teach you all about language, from its structure, to the relationship between language and our identity, the brain, and computers, to writing, language acquisition, and the diversity of human languages! 

If you’ve been meaning to learn introductory linguistics concepts in a more systematic manner, or you want an easy way to share your interest in linguistics with other people, Crash Course Linguistics is a great way to do that! 

It’s been really fun working on the scripts for Crash Course Linguistics since the beginning of 2020 with Lauren Gawne and Jessi Grieser (Lingthusiasm x Crash Course crossover), as well as seeing them come to life through our host Taylor Behnke and the teams at Crash Course and Thought Cafe. 

Semantics: Crash Course Linguistics #5 

If you want to know what a word means, all you have to do is look it up in the dictionary, right? Actually, it’s a little more complicated than that. This episode of Crash Course Linguistics is all about semantics, or the area of linguistics concerned with meaning. We’ll learn about different types of semantic relationships, and how different languages define these relationships, as well as different approaches to semantics. And we’ll discover that the humble definition may be more complicated than we think.

Pragmatics: Crash Course Linguistics #6

We don’t always say exactly what we mean, and yet we’re still pretty good at understanding each other. That’s because we don’t just use meaning to figure out what’s going on, we also use context. This episode of Crash Course Linguistics is all about pragmatics, the area of linguistics that deals with context. We’ll cover the four main assumptions we make about context in language, also known as Grice’s Maxims, as well as the ways that languages can use grammar to convey politeness, and the different types of conversational styles within and between languages.

Crash Course Linguistics #8 - Phonetics 1 (Consonants)

The letters in a word don’t always match the sounds they represent, and people can pronounce words in different ways. Lucky for us, linguists have tools to help understand and communicate speech sounds. In this episode of Crash Course Linguistics, we’ll begin our discussion of phonetics, the study of speech sounds, by talking about consonants, and we’ll also get an introduction to the International Phonetic Alphabet, or IPA.

Crash Course Linguistics #9 - Vowels

In English, we have 5 (well, sometimes 6) vowel letters, but way more vowel sounds. That’s where the IPA can help us! In this episode of Crash Course Linguistics, we’ll learn about vowels, those sounds you can sing with your mouth open, and how we can represent them clearly using the IPA.