#wuglife

wug life | 2024

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.

but seriously, with allthingslinguistic and wuglife powers combined (and we get superlinguo too, if they want), we should totally write a curriculum.

Seriously, let's talk about it. 

LTASS: Long-Term Average Speech Spectrum

When you speak (make noise with your vocal tract), your vocal folds vibrate and create a rich buzzing sound. Think the sound a kazoo makes. That sound goes through your throat and mouth and nose, and is shaped by them. This is the same process that makes flutes sound like flutes and clarinets sound like clarinets. This sound is composed of lots of different frequencies, which we can plot...

image source

Now onto the more advanced stuff!