What can linguistics do (for me)? – or how I turned (from) science (in)to art

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Cover photo: Video still from Some Islands: Pitcairn Island 2016

I write this purposefully provocative piece from Adelaide, South Australia. The University of Adelaide is where I studied linguistics as a graduate student from 2007-2011 and where I worked as a postdoctoral researcher from 2011-2013. From one of my intellectual ground zero points I want to ask myself: what did I learn about linguistics during that time? And further: what can linguistics as a discipline do for me and possibly for others? I pose these two questions because I am situated at a verge; I have begun work in earnest as an experimental documentary film maker where I am turning the arduous work of several of my jaunts of linguistic … ↪

Fieldwork in a maroon community in Brazil – an interview with Ana Paulla Braga Mattos

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[This blog post is part of a three-way interview between Kristoffer Friis Bøegh, Jeroen Willemsen and Ana Paulla Braga Mattos.]

Ana Paulla Braga Mattos is a PhD-researcher at Aarhus University. She conducted fieldwork on Kalunga, an Afro-Brazilian Portuguese variety spoken in the state of Goiás in Brazil. She has one publication about Kalunga coming out soon with the De Gruyter series on Colonial and Postcolonial Linguistics, and another paper comparing Kalunga and other language varieties from the Portuguese-speaking world submitted. She is currently writing about sentential negation in Kalunga Portuguese. We interviewed her in Aarhus about her experiences as a fieldworker.

Could you briefly summarise your descriptive project and the fieldwork you conducted?

I did fieldwork in the state … ↪

Fieldwork in Saint Croix – an interview with Kristoffer Friis Bøegh

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[This blog post is part of a three-way interview between Kristoffer Friis Bøegh, Jeroen Willemsen and Ana Paulla Braga Mattos.]

Kristoffer Friis Bøegh is a PhD-researcher at Aarhus University. He conducted fieldwork on Crucian, an English-based creole language spoken on St. Croix in the US Virgin Islands. He has published on creoles and African languages and is currently analysing his field data. We interviewed him in Aarhus about his experiences as a fieldworker.

Could you briefly summarise your descriptive project and the fieldwork you conducted?

I went to St. Croix, which is one of the Virgin Islands in the Caribbean, to study the local English-lexifier creole language, locally known as Crucian. My project is part of an ongoing effort … ↪

Fieldwork in Nusa Tenggara Timur – an interview with Jeroen Willemsen

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[This blog post is part of a three-way interview between Kristoffer Friis Bøegh, Jeroen Willemsen and Ana Paulla Braga Mattos.]

Jeroen Willemsen is a PhD-researcher at Aarhus University. He conducted fieldwork on Reta, a Papuan language spoken in Eastern Indonesia. Besides his work on Reta, he has published on the function and development of applicatives and serial verbs, and is currently writing a descriptive grammar of Reta. We interviewed him in Aarhus about his experiences as a fieldworker.

Can you briefly summarise your descriptive project and the fieldwork you conducted?

I went to the Nusa Tenggara Timur region of Eastern Indonesia to describe a language called Reta. It’s mainly spoken in two small villages in the south of the … ↪

Ragnarǫk at the University of Copenhagen? The ideology of closing down smaller language programmes

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Johannes gehrts ragnarok mindre

The closure of Old Norse, Old Danish, modern Icelandic, and Faroese as elective courses at the University of Copenhagen is sad news indeed, that has also been covered also in the daily press. That this is a deeply misguided decision will almost certainly be self-evident to readers of Lingoblog. 

Ideological absurdity

There is an obvious absurdity that the oldest university in Denmark will not offer medieval Danish. Or that a world-class Old Norse research institute (Den Arnamagnæanske håndskriftsamling) will no longer offer teaching in Old Norse. Or that the same institute, which is a joint Danish-Icelandic venture, should no longer offer teaching in modern Icelandic. I expect that I will not need to convince you either that this is … ↪

Around Europe in Sixty Languages by Gaston Dorren. Book review.

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This post is a book review of Gaston Dorren’s Lingo: A Language Spotter’s Guide to Europe AND Lingo. Around Europe in Sixty Languages. First edition 2014. New York: Grove Press. Accompanying website: https://languagewriter.com/.

A friend of mine went all the way to the United States and all she bought for me was this book, “Lingo”. The similarity between the name of this blog, Lingoblog.dk and the book is purely coincidental. The author of Lingo is the Dutch language journalist Gaston Dorren.

Lingo is an English adapted version of his Dutch book Taaltoerisme, or “language tourism”, which Dorren wrote a few years ago. A respected friend and colleague had read the book in its Dutch version, and his judgment … ↪

Why are there so many different types of “R”?

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One of the things that got us excited about linguistics back in the days wasn’t any kind of scientific holy grail, such as why only humans have language or whether we are born with an innate language faculty. It was something very simple, namely: why are there so many different types of “R”?

As a speaker of an Eastern-Dutch dialect, I (Jeroen) noticed I could never roll my R’s with the tip of my tongue like in Spanish or Italian. Rather, I roll my R’s with my uvula (the little “ball” in the back of your throat, see the picture below). Why, I wondered, do I roll my R’s in my throat, whereas most people in Amsterdam roll their R’s … ↪