29.991, Language and Pop Culture

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-29-991. Mon Mar 05 2018. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 29.991, Language and Pop Culture

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                                   Michael Czerniakowski)
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Editor for this issue: Clare Harshey <clare at linguistlist.org>
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Date: Mon, 05 Mar 2018 13:35:55
From: LINGUIST List [linguist at linguistlist.org]
Subject: Language and Pop Culture

 
Dear LINGUIST List readers and subscribers,

The last few years have been an unusually good time for representation of
language and linguistics in pop culture. From movies to books to TV shows, 
linguistic science and the wealth of the world’s languages have taken center
screen and center stage in ways we have seldom witnessed before.

Language and linguistics have a fascinating history within the pop culture
narrative, including real-world languages, constructed languages, and
misunderstandings about what sort of work a linguist does.

To start off with one of the giants, philologer and imaginer of worlds J.R.R.
Tolkien is often remembered as the leading edge of pop-culture linguistics,
having invented a world’s worth of languages often based on or influenced by
real languages like Welsh or Finnish, and the standard he set was picked up by
admirers and imitators the world over, leading to an abundance of fictional
languages to populate fictional worlds. As ConLangs find more prominence in
fiction, linguists find themselves asked to do the unusual work of creating
alien tongues like Klingon or the more recent Dothraki.

Recently the film Arrival and the short story it was based on took this idea
to a new level, asking the world what would an alien language actually sound
like? Would it be parsable to a human? Would it have anything like a human
structure? Could a language like that affect the cognition of a human learner?
To get to these questions, the story had to start in a place of trying to
understand how a linguist approaches language documentation in ways never
before represented in pop culture.

But it isn’t only fictional languages that have arrived on scene–Netflix’s 
Manhunt: Unabomber tells the story of the early development of the field of
forensic linguistics through application of sociolinguistics to track down the
infamous serial terrorist Ted Kaczynski. Marvel’s Black Panther followed up
Captain America: Civil War by featuring isiXhosa, one of the official
languages of South Africa, but a language most English-speakers are unlikely
to have heard ever before. Contrast Manhunt’s sociolinguist Natalie Rogers
with delightfully off-base representations of linguists in My Fair Lady’s
Henry Higgins, a phonetician (as he is usually called) whose primary objective
is the promotion of English-language prescriptivism, or Stargate’s lovable
hyperpolyglot Daniel Jackson who is fluent in 27 languages and uses that power
to defeat parasitic aliens that take the very dubious forms of ancient
mythical figures. (We just love movies and TV.)

The recent uptick in effort by filmmakers and content-creators to imagine and
portray language and linguistics has inspired us to reflect on our roles in
society and culture as scholars and language-specialists. Over the last 28
years, you, our subscribers and readers, have supported us in our mission to
create an online space for linguists, to benefit the scientific community, and
to promote linguistic science to the world. Together we’ve worked tirelessly
to do our part in creating a scientifically rich world.

With this in mind, the LINGUIST List invites you to join us in celebrating the
history of our science, our subject, and its unusual, often amusing place in
the history of pop culture, alongside our 2018 fund drive. The LINGUIST List
has been devoted to providing important academic resources for linguists for
nearly three decades, and with your help, we can continue to do just that.
Like last year this year’s fund drive will also feature the remarkable stories
of different linguists every week, and this year we will also be featuring the
exceptional contributions of your nominated undergraduates to the field of
linguistics.

To follow these updates, you can check back on our blog and social media
pages–and most importantly, visit our Fund Drive page
(http://funddrive.linguistlist.org/), where you can learn more about us and
make a donation today. Thank you for your ongoing support!

Yours truly,

Sarah Robinson, on behalf of the LINGUIST List Team







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