WORLDS 2014 - Workshop on Language Description and Sciences

WORkshop on Language Description and Sciences WORLDS -1 is the first of an annual workshop series to be conducted by the Deapartment of Linguistics, K.M. Institute of Hindi and Linguistics, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar University, Agra. It is conceived as a series consisting of several general half-day workshops followed by a more focussed workshop. The major aim of the workshop series is to popularise and spread awareness about Linguistics among the undergraduate students of the country so as to encourage them to take up higher education and research in Linguistics. It is part of this effort that we have also instituted the WORLDS Fellowship which would be available for the outstanding undergraduate participants of the workshop for pursuing M.A. in Linguistics at the department and attending the workshop.
In this first series, a series of three half-day workshops have been already conducted at different local colleges of Agra over a period of last few months. The idea behind these workshops was to acquaint the undergraduate students (and teachers also!) with the field of Language SciencesLinguistics, its methodology, issues and concerns and motivate them towards taking up studies and research in the field. While everybody is aware of the fact that Linguistics has something to do with language, it is not such a commonplace knowledge that it is not about one particular language (like Hindi or English); rather it is all about human language, in general. These introductory workshops gave a whirlwind tour of the field with discussion ranging from brain-language relationship to language politics and from language technology to language evolution. Each workshop ended with a discussion on the career opportunities that a degree in the field offers.
This final workshop in this series is conceived as a mini fieldwork where the participants will be exposed to the basics of data collection, analysis and description, which will be conducted by some of the leading field linguists and experts of language description in India. Since this forms the core of any kind of linguistic study, it is expected to expose the participants to the methods and ways of a linguist and would serve well to combine the theoretical promise of the earlier half-day workshops with the real, practical problems and joys of the field!