Bonus 80: Postcards from linguistics summer camp (Patreon)

What if there was a summer camp for linguists? Like, imagine you could just go somewhere for a few weeks or a month and do linguistics classes and go to linguistics talks and eat your meals with linguists all day every day? Well, this event exists, sort of, and they're called linguistics institutes.

In this bonus episode, Gretchen and Lauren get enthusiastic about Gretchen's visit to the 2023 LSA institute at University of Massachusetts Amherst this summer. We talk about cool projects that Gretchen learned about at this year's Lingstitute, including the Linguistic Atlas Project, the Oxford Dictionary of African American English, and the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project (talks about all of these projects are now available online). We also talk about the history of LSA summer institutes (the first one was in 1928, almost a hundred years ago!), why they're not to be confused with the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), which is a missionary project for Bible translation (awkward), and both Gretchen's history attending various institutes and Lauren's history not attending them (sorry about the FOMO though).

Read the transcript here.

Announcements:

November is our anniversary month and this year we’re celebrating 7 years of Lingthusiasm! We invite you to celebrate with us by sharing your favourite Lingthusiasm episode by sharing a link to your favourite episode, or just sharing your lingthusiasm. Most people still find podcasts through word of mouth, and lots of them don’t yet realise that they could have a fun linguistics chat in their ears every month (or eyes, all Lingthusiasm episodes have transcripts!). If you share Lingthusiasm on social media, tag us so we can reply, and if you share in private, we won’t know but you can feel a warm glow of satisfaction - or feel free to tell us about it on social media if you want to be thanked!

We’re also doing our listener survey again! This is your chance to tell us about what you’re enjoying about Lingthusiasm so far, and what else we could be doing in the future - and your chance to suggest topics! If you took the survey last year, you'll be pleased to hear we've some new fun linguistics experiments this year, so feel free to take it again if you like. You can hear the results from last year here.

Here are the links mentioned in this episode:

• LSA Linguistics Institutes
• Ninetieth Anniversary of the Linguistic Society of America: A Commemorative Symposium by Julia S. Falk (pdf download)
• Linguistic Atlas Project
• Oxford Dictionary of African American English
• Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project
• Lectures from this year's Lingstitute (videos watchable online with ASL interpretation)
• COZIL Pride month Wikipedia editathon
• 3-Minute Thesis competition
• Lingthusiasm bonus episode '103 ways for kids to learn languages'
• Pedro Mateo Pedro Interview about how kids learn Q'anjob'al and other Mayan languages
• Slides from Gretchen's talk on doing linguistics on lingcomm

You can listen to this episode on this page, via the Patreon RSS or download the mp3. A transcript of this episode is available as a Google Doc. Lingthusiasm is also on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and Mastodon. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com or chat to us on the Patreon page. Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic. Lauren is on Twitter as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

To chat about this episode and other lingthusiastic topics with your fellow linguistics fans, join us on the Lingthusiasm Discord server.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, and our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.