Well, I’ve decided that I would write a series on linguistics so that I can help my friends and family to better understand what it is that I actually have spent my university years doing and plan on doing for the rest of my life. When people ask me what I studied or what I study and I reply that I study linguistics they almost always say the same thing, “What is that? Like you work with languages or something?”.  Instead of diving into the details of what linguistics REALLY is I just say well linguistics is the scientific study of language and not really just the study of languages.  Now most people who have some intelligence will understand the differences but I’m going to describe what I mean by that and I’ll have to use linguistics to do it.

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Tags: Acoustic Phonetics, Articulatory Phonetics, Auditory Phonetics, Orthography, Phonetics

Sally Thomason is a linguistics professor at the University of Michigan. She is most well known for her work done in contact linguistics but she also has done work for many years on the Salish language spoken in the North Western part of the US. Below is a talk she gave to the LINGUISTlist about her fieldwork on Salish where she comments on fieldwork in general and tells us about the Salish lanuage.

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Tags: Fieldwork, Language Documentation, LINGUISTlist, Salish, Sally Thomason, University of Michigan

Two days ago an article came out in the New York Times about endangered languages found among the citizens of one of the most well known cities in the world, New York City. A team of three consisting of a poet, a field linguist, and professor have started a project called “Endangered Language Alliance” (ELA, pronounced ay-la). The ELA’s goals “is to further the documentation, description, maintenance, and revitalization of threatened and endangered languages, and to educate the public about the causes and consequences of language extinction.” (more…)

Tags: Daniel Kaufman, description, documentation, ELA, Endangered Language Alliance, maintenanc, New York City, New York Times, revitilization

Usually when I post an article related to the topic of this website, that being endangered languages, I’ll post my own response and reasoning for posting in the same post as the article. Since “Personal Testimony” was a bit long, I’ve decided to write my response as a separate blog post. Hopefully you will read the post before reading this post! (more…)

Tags: Alan R. King, Basque, Euskal Herria, Euskaldunon Egunkaria, Facebook, Interpreter, Linguist, Nawat, Translator, University of Nevada at Reno

“Personal Testimony”

Written by Alan R. King

Wednesday, April 14, 2010 at 10:09am

2003.

It was my first year living in El Salvador when I saw the news, on the internet at work, about a Spanish judge sending in the hated Guardia Civil to forcibly shut down Euskaldunon Egunkaria, the only Basque-language national daily newspaper, confiscate the installations, arrest the employees and management who faced criminal charges and long jail sentences, on trumped-up politically-motivated charges.
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Tags: Alan R. King, Basque, Basque Country, Basque Language, Berria, Egunero, El Salvadro, ETA, Euskaldunon Egunkaria, Exker Abertzalea, Guardia Civil, Newspaper, Spain, Spanish