PODCAST · society

Linglab

by North Carolina Language and Life Project

LingLab is the brain child of graduate students in the Sociolinguistics program at NC State University. We don’t think about it much sometimes, but language touches every single thing we do as human beings. So, linguists themselves are a fascinating group of people because there is incredible diversity in the areas of language that we study (plus, we are SUPER fun at parties). In our linguistics lab at NCSU (yes, it is a physical lab), we have linguists who study bilingualism in Korean hip hop music, text message lingo, the use of Caribbean dialects in literature (just to name a few!) Did you know that you can actually measure a vowel and generate a quantitative graph of someone’s accent? We do that too, and so much more. Every day our lab is full of really interesting conversations about the nature of language and the different ways it takes on a life of its own in the world, and the many different approaches we take to analyzing it.