Linguistics/Gallery

Linguistics gallery

(CC) Photo: Nick Thompson Humans instinctively communicate, as the conversation of these men in Naples, Italy shows.     (CC) Photo: James L. Stahl People in Port Vila, Vanuatu express their language equivalents for the pictured items. Vanuatu has over 100 languages, most of which are unwritten.     (CC) Photo: Rebecca Grabill I love you in American Sign Language.     (CC) Photo: Nick Thompson Stopping and talking is central to human culture.     (CC) Photo: Churl Han An example of written language - in this case, English.     (CC) Photo: Daniel Greene This lecture on American Sign Language is being conducted in ASL. Today, much research on sign language comes from linguists who are themselves deaf.     (CC) Photo: Jennifer Lee Language may be written using different orthographies using modern technology. This is a Taiwanese computer keyboard allowing input in Chinese characters, romanised Chinese languages and a script explicitly indicating Chinese pronunciation.     (CC) Photo: John Stephenson Why this shop name in Japan? Linguists also investigate how language is used, but how it is 'abused' is left to others.     (PD) Photo: Praat program by Paul Boersma and David Weenink Phonetics often involves modern technology to analyse speech, providing evidence for linguists on the nature of spoken language. This spectrogram as used in acoustic phonetics shows the frequencies of vibrations involved in the production of six British English vowels by an adult male native speaker: from left to right, the vowels as in bee, sue, herd, or, bar and buy. The bands of energy (formants) are distinctive for each vowel; for example, the lower the bottom formant ('F1'), the higher the vowel is articulated in the mouth. The greater the distance between F1 and the second-lowest 'F2' formant correlates with how far back in the mouth the vowel is produced. This image was created using the Praat freeware program.     (CC) Photo: Mark Allanson One reason to study linguistics is its importance in human culture - so important is this urge to communicate that it is often depicted in art.     (CC) Photo: Pietro Izzo Panel from an Inuit language exposition at the 2006 Winter Universiade Games in Turin, Italy.     (CC) Photo: James L. Stahl Vernacular languages literacy materials used on Pentecost Island in Vanuatu.     (CC) Photo: John Stephenson Newer streets signs in parts of western Scotland display names in Scottish Gaelic above English - older signs are in English only. The promotion or proscription of languages is called language planning and is one topic studied in sociolinguistics.

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