Learning Goals

• Understand the structure of human language, how human languages work, and how humans use their languages;

• Understand the structures of language including phonology, syntax, and semantics, and analyze the interplay between them;

• Understand how linguists use various theories and models to represent language;

• Understand how language influences the way we interact with each other and with the larger world around us, including cultural and sociolinguistic context of speech communities;

• Understand how language ideologies and linguistic prejudices create and reinforce hegemonic power structures;

• Gain significant experience with the grammar of a non-Indo European language, in order to observe some of the typological diversity of human language;

• Learn to work with speaker/signers of a language as a means of understanding language;

• Learn to work with and critically evaluate published sources as a means of understanding language;

• Understand appropriate methodologies for collecting linguistic data, including best practices for responsible and ethical collection, storage, and use of data in ways that respect the relevant speakers and their communities, cultures, and needs;

• Organize data and observe patterns, puzzles, etc. in data;

• Formulate and evaluate research questions, hypotheses, and analyses;

• Articulate research questions, hypotheses, and analyses clearly in writing and in presentations.