Authors

Regulating Language

As a field of study, linguistics is a relative newcomer compared to more established social sciences like anthropology and psychology—but you might expect that linguists would have at least agreed where to draw the line between dialect and language. Alas, as always, the reality is much more complex.

Regulating Language

Sign language is something that few people even experience in their daily lives, let alone learn. Even as a linguistics student, I’ve found that my education has focused exclusively on speech, with casual references made here and there on the applicability of theory used for spoken languages to sign language; even then, it’s mostly an afterthought.

Regulating Language

One of the first problems that you must solve when setting up an education system—though it’s probably not something that an Australian would ever think about—is what language it will use. Ideally, it should be one spoken widely by students, which is why English is a good fit for classrooms in Australia, Japanese is a good fit for classrooms in Japan, and so on.

Flash Fiction One: Rejected Black Mirror Pitches

Laura wakes up. She thinks, “Oh god, I’ve got that big presentation today!” She jumps out of bed to get dressed, but suddenly! Her legs are computers!!!!!!!!!! By the time she gets to work the meeting is over and she’s still in her pyjamas.