#protolinguists

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:

I’ve been wanting to interview an English language teacher for this series since I started it. I spent some time teaching English before I started my undergraduate degree, and I know that I would have benefited from many of the skills I learnt in my linguistics major. I met Ash when he was doing his Honours year. I knew that he had gone to Japan to teach English, and he very kindly agreed to be interviewed. Turns out he’s been busy since then!

What did you study at university?

I did a Bachelor of Arts/Bachelor of Science double degree, with majors in Geology, Japanese and Linguistics. As it happens, linguistics was the major I enjoyed most and pursued for the longest.

In linguistics, I did a wide range of subjects, but those I found most interesting were about grammar (syntax and morphology). In my Honours year I wrote a thesis on the grammar of an Australian language called Marri Ngarr.

I have since also completed a Masters in TESOL, in which my linguistics background not only helped me get lots of credit for prior learning, but also simplified much of the learning for me

What is your job?

After graduating I worked as an English teacher in a Japanese junior high school, primary school, kindergarten and local town adult evening class. Day-to-day I assisted a main Japanese teacher at the junior high school to make her classes more communicative and overall more interesting for the students. At the primary school and kinder I ran the classes myself, combining insights from both my linguistics major and masters degree (that I was doing simultaneously) to try to make truly effective and innovative lessons. Although phonetics had never been my main interest during my uni days, it was especially useful in teaching Japanese children how to pronounce English sounds.

These days I am not working full time, but have become a language student myself in Korea. Learning Korean has definitely been made easier by my knowledge of Japanese and by my knowledge of linguistics, in particular how people learn languages best, and just in grasping grammatical and semantic nuances faster than some of my classmates.

At the same time, I still do some English teaching in the form of private tutoring. Again, my linguistic knowledge helps in every single lesson, whether I'm explaining how someone should position their mouth to pronounce a tricky sound, explaining an English grammar point, advising on how best to improve/study, or just generally in my selection of activities for the tutoring session.

Do you gave any advice do you wish someone had given to you about linguistics/careers/university?

Study linguistics! If you have even a small amount of interest in language, linguistics will enable you to understand it in deeper ways than you can even imagine before linguistics training. And if you are considering a career as a language teacher, linguistics will make you a far better teacher.

Also, don't do a language major in university: A year in a language school (or even self-study) in the country where it is spoken is worth more than any amount of study of that language in an Australian university. This is particularly true if you have some linguistics training to help you along.

Previously:

Interview with a Speech Pathologist

Interview with a computational linguist

Interview with a language revitalisation program director

Interview with a media language researcher

Interview with an editor and copywriter

Interview with a humanitarian aid worker

Interview with a high school teacher

Interview with an interpreter

Interview with a journalist

The Virtual Linguistics Campus - University-level linguistics online

The Virtual Linguistics Campus bills itself as “the world’s largest linguistics pMOOC Curriculum”. I took the opportunity to register and poke around their website. It is, indeed, a comprehensive set of educational resources. You can register for free to access any of their linguistics courses (from what I can tell they make money from selling courses in CSS and HTML).

Here’s the home screen for their Linguistics 101 ‘Fundamentals’. It covers more or less what I’ve seen in most introductory courses. Each course section includes videos to introduce content, worksheets, readings and questions to answer. If you’re thinking of studying linguistics, or don’t have access to a course at your university this could be a structured way to learn more.

The full list of courses currently available is below. Even if you don’t want to register to do their courses all the videos are available on Youtube from what I can gather.

Linguistics 101 – Fundamentals https://youtu.be/f2hvGzF2GKU

Linguistics 102 – Speech Science https://youtu.be/jwh1KpBlqWI

Linguistics 103 – The Nature of Meaning https://youtu.be/5VSAR8prDDQ

Linguistics 104 – Words and Word Structure https://youtu.be/zkS_qbgO-c8

Linguistics 201 – The Structure of English https://youtu.be/d3BcbJonGCE

During last week’s post about the Australian words survey I briefly mentioned The Linguistics Roadshow. From their website:

The Linguistics Roadshow is a fun and interactive showcase about the science of language, presenting the big questions and the little-known facts about language for high-school students. The Roadshow consists of a team of linguists from the University of Melbourne and the Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language who are passionate about bringing their knowledge about language and linguistics to rural Australian high-school students.  

The team have finished their 2015 Roadshow, having visited high-school students in Ararat, Murtoa, and Dimboola, in rural Victoria, Australia. They report that the workshops went very well, and that they really enjoyed visiting the schools. Students were engaged during the opening mini-talks introducing linguistics, global language diversity, and Australia's rich linguistic history, and then happily got elbow-deep in linguistics over the course of three activity groups. They puzzled out Dyirbal noun classes, tried a wug test while chatting about child language acquisition, and comparing human language to animal and machine communication, and then hotly debated lexical variants in Australian English while filling out a short survey and looking at maps of variation across the country. These activities gave them a taste of the sort of work linguists do, and the types of data linguists collect to find out more about how language works. The Roadshow team also learned a few new things, like the word 'florry' - a local delicacy in the Horsham/Murtoa area - and the preference for 'bubble tap' across western Victoria, quite different to the mix of 'drink tap', 'drinking tap', and 'drinking fountain' in Victoria's capital, Melbourne. The students each left with a showbag full of goodies, including a DIY paper larynx, secret spectrograms, an Auslan fingerspelling alphabet, and other bits of swag collected at the activity groups, with the Team Potato Cake badges being especially popular.

With any luck the Linguistics Roadshow will be hitting the road again in 2016. Until then their website has a whole bunch of great resources, links and information about studying linguistics.

Regular Superlinguo readers will recognise the team from their fantastic linguistics baking featured here; Katie made that amazing Australian Language Biscuit map, Rosey created this fabulous tongue and Jill sculpted this Rosetta  Stone tribute. And, of course, Jill was my co-author on the LOLspeak work.

Before you declare a major in anything, you should make sure you know you like it. Or if not like it, that you can do it. That’s primary. Next is the knowledge that you can always change your mind, and that it’s okay to do so. Finally, you should major in linguistics because it’s awesome and useful!

Check out allthingslinguistic's protolinguist series, the LSA’s page on what linguistics is and is used for, and LinguistList’s student portal. These resources should help you figure out if linguistics is something you want to do. Even if you don’t want to “become a linguist”, though, linguistics is great for careers in lots of fields (therapy, general ed, history, english, world languages, writing, sociology, anthropology, computer science, among others).

I got into linguistics in an unusual way. I have always been interested in language and science, but I didn’t know linguistics was a thing until high school choir class. We learned the International Phonetic Alphabet to learn to pronounce lyrics in other languages. It was at that point I learned that there was an entire field dedicated to the study of how humans use language to communicate. Initially, I was interested in sounds — how we produce, understand, and modulate them. That’s since morphed into an interest in how sound influences the way we understand sentence-length utterances that might have very complex or ambiguous structures.

These days, I haven’t been posting much because I’m trying to finish my dissertation soon and I’ve been applying to jobs and a whole lot of other stuff… but don’t worry! I am still here and still going to keep wuglife alive (especially after I’ve defended!!).