Language Learning

Through middle and high school I studied Mandarin Chinese, leading me to become proficient in it. What prompted me to develop my more general deep interest in linguistics was eventually trying Japanese in my free time, since I knew already that it was also written in Chinese characters, and encountering the commonalities and contrasts between the two. I was similarly struck by the close connection between French and English around the same time on a family trip to Montréal, Québec. This prompted me to participate in a four-week summer immersion program in French for high schoolers.

The subfield within linguistics that I find most engaging is the development and evolution of languages over time (i.e., historical linguistics). This is what allows us to not only explain the connections between languages, but also become tuned in enough to notice aspects of the languages that we speak that would otherwise remain in our subconscious awareness. This can be especially valuable when it comes to the etymologies of everyday words; in the case of English, these tend to be either “native” vocabulary (i.e. inherited from Proto-Germanic, the precursor to Old English and also unsurprisingly Old German) or borrowings from Latin (often via French) or Ancient Greek. All three of these sources, of course, represent branches of the vast Indo-European language family, whose other branches include, but are not limited to, the Slavic languages (i.e. Russian, Polish, etc.), the Celtic languages (i.e. Irish, Welsh, etc.), the Iranian languages (i.e. Farsi, Kurdish, etc.) and the Indo-Aryan languages (i.e. Hindi/Urdu, Bengali, etc.).

Given the indispensable role of language as a cornerstone of human civilization, and the doors that language learning can open for any individual, I not only completed a minor in Linguistics during my time as an undergraduate, but have also created various resources to make this field more accessible. Included here are a few of these; specifically, maps presenting the extent of some aforementioned language families.