Linguistics at Down Under National Youth Science Forum

By -
Representing linguistics at science forum, some links and photos. Material to inspire those interesting in linguistics and perhaps also useful things to other linguists thinking of doing the same thing.

Colleagues and I at the Centre (of Excellence) for Language Dynamics, and from linguistics at the College of Asia-Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences at Australian National University have recently been involved in representing linguistics at the Down Under National Youth Science Forum. It's organised by Rotary Down Under (Australia, Solomons, Papua New Guinea, Tonga, Samoa, New Caledonia, Fiji, Vanuatu, Nauru, Norfolk, American Samoa and New Zealand) and is taking place here in Canberra where I live.

Lots of high school students attended, mainly from Australia and New Zealand, and they were very enthusiastic, to say the least :)! We got lots of clever questions and reflections, we were much impressed with the students. This was the first time linguistics was covered in this Science Forum, and we think it went very well and hope that the students enjoyed it too!

We did a lab visit - a series of short introductory talks - and participated in a "speed date a scientist" event.
Yours truly talking with hands. Photographer: Evana Ho

Lab visit




Speed Dating a Scientist
Alexandra Marley and Hedvig Skirgårdat the speed date a scientist event.
(The students had not arrived on the lower one.) Photos from my insta.

At the speed dating event we were four linguist attending The most common question was of course "how many languages do you speak?" which is an issue we've covered earlier in more detail here and that I should perhaps take up again.

They also asked about the future of language on the planet, hardest language to learn, linguistic relativism and other interesting topics. If you want to know more, ask us :)!

We got other questions as well, and the students were very sweet and interested. It was an unusual, but fun event. We only got 10 minutes with each group of students, but in that time you do get to cover a lot of stuff if you're keen!



If you're interested in linguistics or looking to do something similar, might I recommend these posts?

Also check out the tag "Current Linguistic Research" and the slides from the lab visit.

If you're a secondary school student anywhere in the world, do check out the International Linguistics Olympiad and see if you can compete!



P.S. My native language is not English and I'm not very comfortable with the "science" = "natural sciences" idea that seems prevalent in anglophone societies. If you want to have a longer discussion of why linguistics is a science, we could, but basically just consider that if you apply the scientific method to a study object you are doing science regardless of what the study object is. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Global Tree of Languages

By -
Image
I was a reviewer for the Evolution of Language (Evolang) conference for the first time this year, a tedious-sounding task that turned out to be hilarious.  The conference attracts some bizarre manuscripts on the origins of language, one particularly imaginative one I wanted to devote a blogpost to, but regretfully cannot because of reviewer confidentiality. Also in my inbox to review was the most exciting paper about language that I’d ever seen.  I recommended acceptance obviously, even though it was only tangentially related to the theme of the conference, and it was accepted as a poster and published in the conference proceedings (available here ).  The paper was by Gerhard Jäger and Søren Wichmann, about constructing a world family tree of languages using a database of basic vocabulary, the ASJP database .  Claims about how language families may be related are nothing new but are normally statistically uninformed (such as work by Merritt Ruhlen and Joseph Gr...
Read more

Language family maps

By -
Image
Last week, I assigned Bernhard Comrie's (2017) chapter 'The Languages of the World' (from The Handbook of Linguistics, 2017) to a class. It's a basic overview of the world's language families, which is what I wanted them to read, but for one thing: there are no maps in it. I overcompensated in class by presenting a 30-item list of maps, because some things are just so much easier to understand using visual representations. I decided to post some of the best ones I could find here, for future reference and in order to invite you to post better ones in the comments. This blog has featured posts on maps before, by  Hedvig on how to best represent linguistic diversity on maps and by  Matt on new approaches to ethnographies-linguistic maps . It's clear that the kind of maps that are typically used to depict the spatial distribution of languages of a single language family are fraught with difficulties. Typically they deal with multilingualism very poorly, the data...
Read more

My ELAN workflow for segmenting and transcription

By -
Image
Hello everyone, Hedvig here. I'm currently writing up my PhD thesis, hence the lack of writing here. Hopefully I'll be able to pick it up after submission, there's a lot of drafts lying on blogger waiting for completion. If you really, really miss me in particular, you could listen to my ramble at Talk the Talk - a weekly show about linguistics. Now that the shameless plug and excuses are done with, let's get down and talk about: THE TRANSCRIPTION CHALLENGE! In this blog post, I will focus on a part of this challenge¹ - the workflow for segmenting and transcribing  audio material. This is a rough guide, if it turns out people appreciate something like this I'll re-write it more thoroughly. This is a bit sloppily written in places, but trust me - if I do this "properly" right now I will lose days of work time that I should be spending on my thesis... so, I'll only do it if people really want it - and I might wait a while until I do. Sor...
Read more