Volume 10, Issue s3 - Special Issue: Public Outreach in Linguistics; Guest Editors: Wagner, Laura; Zellou, Georgia

This is the introduction to the special collection on public outreach in linguistics.

In this article, we discuss various public-facing scholarly activities we have engaged in and how these initiatives have reached large audiences to widely spread messages about language and linguistic equity and inclusion. We provide guidance for how to launch, coordinate, and carry out public outreach initiatives and community-engaged research, how to navigate potential pitfalls and position these efforts for success, and how to demonstrate the direct value and relevance of the work. We also offer strategies and advice for other linguists engaging in public outreach endeavors, especially with regard to connecting community-engaged work with teaching and research for maximal impact within the scholarly ecosystem. Community-engaged research and public-facing initiatives are best conceptualized and undertaken in comprehensive, intentional, informed by, and planned in ways that align with best practices in the literature and integrated into the scholarly enterprise. We assert that public-facing work is critical to the relevance and impact of linguistics and higher education. Most importantly, public-facing work that makes insights from research relevant to the public can help advance the broader goal of education for social impact and the public good.

Linguistics communication (lingcomm) is uniquely placed as a branch of science communication (scicomm), as lingcomm practitioners can reflexively draw on our own discipline of linguistics to further our understanding of effective communication practices with broader audiences. In this article we cut across various sub-disciplines of linguistics to look at syntactic, semantic, and discourse practices that make for compelling communication. We refer to this as the way a text incites curiosity, or the value of “curiosity”, by analogy with “grammaticality” and “felicity” as linguistic concepts. We look at an example text with high curiosity in scicomm, before highlighting key linguistic features of curiosity. We also show how we implement these in our own lingcomm work, and discuss the implications for effective lingcomm. We conclude with potential avenues for exploring curiosity in scicomm and lingcomm, and the importance of linguists contributing to public understanding of language.

This paper outlines a unit on linguistics in the curriculum of the writing seminar taken by all undergraduate students at the University of Pennsylvania. The linguistic unit introduces undergraduates to key concepts from linguistic scholarship, and compels students to engage with these language issues in order to advance their consciousness of linguistic inequity and their appreciation of linguistic diversity. Taking our cue from linguists, the unit focuses on the descriptive and contrasts it with the prescriptive approach with which they are typically accustomed. It introduces foundational ideas about language, languaging, and linguistic discrimination through readings and videos. Students write guided reflections in response to the readings and screenings, culminating in a personal narrative and questions they share with their peers on an online discussion board, exploring their own and others’ language use or language attitudes. Upon completion of this unit, many students confirm one of the unit’s learning outcomes by expressing a new awareness of a linguistic climate that they had previously assumed was neutral. Our goal, in part, is to render the campus’s linguistic climate more equitable by advancing students’ consciousness of linguistic inequity and appreciation of the rich diversity of their voices.

Introductory linguistics courses are a common component of general education curricula at many institutions of higher education, reaching tens of thousands of students with diverse backgrounds and interests. Such courses provide a great opportunity for linguists to convey the field’s message and its values to a wider audience. We propose that it is possible to increase the public outreach of such courses by engaging not only the students in the course, but also the campus community at large. In this paper, we report on using constructed languages (conlangs) as a tool to help students understand course materials via active learning as well as present linguistic research to the wider community of college campuses.

One way to bring greater awareness to the fact that language can be, and often is, studied scientifically is to show people the scientific tools that linguists use to study it, such as the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). This project investigated how doing a common IPA activity might influence people’s perceptions of language science and linguists. Adult visitors to a science museum ( N  = 117) participated in an activity in which they saw their name transcribed into the IPA and were guided to notice how it differed from the standard spelling, informed about some basic articulatory phonetics connected to the sounds in their names, and encouraged to think about the differences between sounds and letters more generally. Participants were then surveyed about what they had learned and their attitudes about language science. The results showed that most participants learned at least some of the core content material. More notably, the participants were more likely to believe that aspects of language such as poetry and dialects could be studied experimentally by scientists than a control group of adults who had not participated. These results demonstrate that even a brief intervention, if thoughtfully conducted, can shift attitudes towards the belief that language can be studied scientifically.

This paper explores the nuances of popularizing linguistics among teenagers by sharing the successes and setbacks encountered in Noorlingvistide keeleklubi – an Estonian-based monthly event series where high school students learn about language science. Initially conceived as a pilot project, from March to December 2023, the language club held six meetings, each centering on a specific linguistics topic. Throughout the meetings, students gave feedback for improving both the content and organization of the meetings. Sixty-four students with varying prior linguistics knowledge participated, with their feedback indicating an increased interest in the field because of the initiative.

This paper presents an overview of the Linguistics Roadshow, an interactive showcase about the science of language and a hub for fun and interactive resources about linguistics. The Roadshow began as a travelling high school outreach programme introducing Australian students to linguistics and has grown to include online resources, providing an accessible introduction to linguistics with information about how students can pursue their interests in language. This paper is intended to provide a general guide to conducting linguistics-themed school incursions, to highlight opportunities afforded and challenges faced in undertaking this kind of outreach. We discuss the motivations for developing the Roadshow, outline the process of designing the workshop programme and materials, and offer a detailed description of the content and format. We reflect on our achievements and impact as well as lessons learned, and discuss future directions for a sustainable Roadshow and for linguistics outreach in the Australian context.

The Language Science Station (LSS) is a research and engagement laboratory operating at the Planet Word museum in Washington, DC, representing a unique partnership between language researchers and a museum dedicated to language. The LSS invites Planet Word guests – ranging from local to international visitors – to participate in research studies and engage in educational activities with student language scientists from diverse academic backgrounds. In doing so, we broaden participation in the language sciences among both the researchers and the participant population. This paper outlines the goals, values, and structure of the LSS, highlighting our dual emphases on research and engagement. We focus on several aspects of the project. These include our novel multi-university researcher-museum partnership, the different considerations that we find are necessary for conducting research in a museum setting compared to the laboratory, and our training of researchers and student research assistants. The paper also provides reflections from students on their interactions with museum visitors. We share our experiences with the broader scholarly community in an effort to lower barriers for other behavioral scientists interested in combining research and engagement in public venues.

I make Accentricity , a podcast exploring language and identity. After releasing series 1 in 2019, I began to plan ways to take a more participatory approach to the creation of a second series, involving contributors in the production process as co-creators. The result was The Moving Project: a podcasting course and mentorship programme designed to help people tell personal stories about language, migration, and identity. Over a period of six months, the participants developed their audio-recording, editing, and digital storytelling skills. Together we created a podcast series which tells diverse and complex stories about migration, language, and identity, from a range of different geographical, social, and historical contexts. Like the first series of Accentricity , The Moving Project provides information about language to a public audience in an accessible format. However, it goes much further than the first series in centring non-academic perspectives and in developing participatory and inclusive methods for knowledge co-production.

Within the criminal legal system, judges, jurors, prosecutors, defense attorneys, experts, and law enforcement officers all might employ language or language practices in the courtroom that can evoke racial bias against an accused person, including by using coded language, innuendos, or particular questioning techniques and clarification strategies. In light of recent legislation, including the passage of the Racial Justice Act in California, which prohibits the use of racially biased language against an accused person by courtroom actors, we are at a crucial moment where dialogue between linguists and lawyers is imperative to define racially biased language and how it emerges. In this article, we provide guidance to help identify and address the ways race can be invoked through discursive strategies in the courtroom that do not make explicit mentions of race, and end with recommendations for ameliorating the potential harms that racial bias expressed during such interactions can cause.

As researchers who rely on federal funding and community participation, we have an obligation to return scientific knowledge to the community. Our outreach goals are to share information about language development and sensory impairments, introduce language science to future scientists, distribute scientific results accessibly, and illuminate the breadth of what science and scientists look like. We seek to achieve this in two ways: by sharing about language science beyond the ivory tower through short videos on social media and easy-to-read articles on our blog, and through educational outreach. For the latter, in recent efforts we designed and implemented after-school programming for young public schoolchildren, targeting early negative attitudes about STEM abilities. We presented profiles of underrepresented scientists in a range of fields, including language science, and discussed language modalities using observation games to help children appreciate science as a creative process of questions and failure – something they could do, not just “others” who do not look like them. We used the Draw-a-Scientist Task to assess our impact: children’s drawings were more representative after our program. In this article, we explore our missteps, difficulties, and successes.