[lg policy] A Language Museum?

Wed Feb 1 16:25:18 UTC 2017

A Language Museum?

Franklin School in Washington, D.C. (Image via Wikimedia Commons.)

The question mark was to get your attention. As of last Wednesday, we can
change it to a period: A language museum.

On January 25, the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic
Development in Washington, D.C., announced that the historic Franklin
School has been approved for development into a museum called Planet Word.
The project is spearheaded by — and privately funded by — the
philanthropist and former reading teacher Ann Friedman.

A friend who clearly reads The Washington Post closely emailed me last
Wednesday to see if I knew anything about this
what-clearly-seemed-to-her-surprising bit of news. I replied, “I’m on the
Advisory Board!”

When Ann Friedman emailed me last summer about joining the board of
language experts she had put together for Planet Word, it took me about,
oh, two seconds to decide that I would say yes. Not only was I joining some
wonderful colleagues on the board, but I was supporting a project that
could make a real difference in language education.

Let me explain what I mean by talking about the introductory-linguistics
course I teach at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Early in the
course we talk about how language changes, how dictionaries are created,
and where some of the well-known usage rules (e.g., don’t end a sentence
with a preposition, don’t use ‘they’ as a singular pronoun) come from.
Suddenly “right” and “wrong” don’t seem like entirely stable concepts when
it comes to language. By the time we get to American dialects and world
varieties of English near the end of the course, and we read about the ways
that people continue to be discriminated against based on the dialect of
English they speak, students are often wondering why they never learned
this material earlier in their educational career. As one student exclaimed
this fall, “It shouldn’t be that I’m learning this only now that I’m in
college! And what about the students who don’t take a linguistics course?”

Rethinking K-12 language education in a more linguistically informed way is
an ambitious undertaking. At its core is the key realization that
linguistics is relevant to our understanding of the language we see and
hear every day. My goal, which I share with students in my introductory
linguistics course, is to see language incorporated into the curriculum in
a much more exploratory way, where students are exploring how language
works. As Kirk Hazen at West Virginia University has argued, students
should be learning a little linguistics in early grades in the same way
that they are learning a little geology, a little chemistry, a little
biology, and so on. There is nothing more human than language, and students
should learn about how language evolves, how dialects work, how they create
new slang, how humans and computers learn language, and more — as they also
learn the conventions of standard, formal writing (which right now too
often gets equated with “what students need to know about language”). Kids
love to play with language, and we could exploit that much more in the
elementary- and secondary-school curriculum than we do.

This new museum promises to set the tone for language exploration for
people of all ages. The description of Planet Word proposes “to make
reading, writing, words, and language surprising, fun, fascinating, and
relevant.” We hope to let people experiment with language technologies in a
working language-research lab. Exhibits will feature language in all its
variation, both spoken and written. The auditorium will host lectures on
language, poetry readings, and the like. Most importantly, visitors will
have the chance to play with language throughout the museum and seek
answers to the questions they may bring (e.g., What makes a word a word? Do
men and women speak differently? How could the New York Times dialect quiz
pinpoint where I was from? How do puns really work?).

As it becomes less surprising that an entire museum could be devoted to
language exploration (which is, of course, fundamental to the entire
discipline of linguistics), I hope it will become more commonplace to see
this same kind of linguistically informed language exploration in school
curricula. This new museum has the potential to support the important
efforts of linguists across the United States (and elsewhere) to design
curricular materials on, for example, local dialects — and to inspire
teachers at all levels to design their own linguistically informed lessons.
And it is going to make for some great school field trip

http://www.chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2017/01/31/a-language-museum/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en&elqTrackId=a6d704e1c1bf49beb348a1f9e7dd0bb5&elq=bc51863297204178b8893122f3cf75ec&elqaid=12385&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=5035

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 Harold F. Schiffman

Professor Emeritus of
 Dravidian Linguistics and Culture
Dept. of South Asia Studies
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305

Phone:  (215) 898-7475
Fax:  (215) 573-2138

Email:  haroldfs at gmail.com
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/

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