Looking to get yourself ready for first year study? Have a look through the following list of recommendations of things to read, listen to and watch from academic staff at English Language and Linguistics.
Watching
Arrival: A linguist works with the military to communicate with alien lifeforms after twelve mysterious spacecraft appear around the world.
The Linguists: David and Greg are “The Linguists,” who document languages on the verge of extinction. In the rugged landscapes of Siberia, India, and Bolivia, their resolve is tested by institutionalised racism and violent economic unrest.
Is the man who is tall happy?: A series of interviews featuring linguist, philosopher and activist Noam Chomsky done in hand-drawn animation.
BBC Horizon: Why do we talk?: Talking is something that is unique to humans, yet it still remains a mystery. Horizon meets the scientists beginning to unlock the secrets of speech – including a father who is filming every second of his son’s first three years in order to discover how we learn to talk, the autistic savant who can speak more than 20 languages, and the first scientist to identify a gene that makes speech possible.
Project Nim: Tells the story of a chimpanzee taken from its mother at birth and raised like a human child by a family in a brownstone on the New York upper West Side in the 1970s.
Eleni Kapogianni, Lecturer in Linguistics, says: “If you enjoy sci-fi, the episode “Darmok” from Star Trek: The Next Generation has a really fun concept about how linguistic meaning could work in a fictional language.”
Podcasts
Lingthusiasm (https://lingthusiasm.com/) is a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. A lively, deep, language-y conversation with real linguists!
Blogs
The “All Things Linguistic” blog (https://allthingslinguistic.com/) also by Gretchen McCulloch, is a daily blog featuring…all things linguistic!
Puzzles
The International Linguistics Olympiad – and its UK page www.uklo.org – is one of 13 International Science Olympiads for secondary school students, and has been held annually since 2003. Each year, teams of young linguists from around the world gather and test their minds against the world’s toughest puzzles in language and linguistics. No prior knowledge of linguistics or languages is required: even the hardest problems require only logical ability, patient work, and willingness to think around corners. Give some of their past problems a try!
Reading
Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn: Ella lives on a fictional island of Nollop which was named after the man that wrote “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”. At the start of the book, a letter tile has fallen off the statue and the island’s council decide that this is Nollop speaking from the grave, telling them not to use that letter anymore. The book is written in a series of letters so as more tiles fall, words with them in are no longer used in the letters. It’s really great to slowly see the impact that it has on the language.
When it comes to (old but very topical) novels, you can see how language and linguistic constructs/manipulations serve the purposes of dystopian and utopian societies in George Orwell’s 1984 and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed.
A recent top 10 read – Vox by Christian Dalcher who is actually a linguist – the book is about a dystopian America where women and girls are limited to 100 words a day, and if they exceed that they’re given an electric shock from a bracelet they must all wear at all times. Scary stuff!
A classic read is Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban, and it’s set in East Kent but in the distant future after a nuclear holocaust, and the language has changed as it undoubtedly will. The entire book is written in a new version of English that caused Hoban no end of difficulties after he finished writing it because he was used to using non-standard spellings. The novel tells the story of a young boy growing up and discovering the truth about the community he lives it and its destruction (rather than creation) story. Worth it for the renamed local villages alone! Here’s the Riddley Walker map:
