Linguistics

Recently, I’ve been working on mapping the languages of South Asia by organising the scholarly work that has been done on individual varieties—this means sociolinguistic surveys, grammatical descriptions of standardised dialects, and any other fieldwork-based study of language. At first the goal was to organise the works that I read and reference in a way that is (1) useful to others, and (2) easy to browse through, but I came to realise that it can be useful beyond that, for more general-purpose language mapping....

This is a question I’ve been dealing with ever since I went down this academic path, and one that I think I will continue to grapple with for a long time: what is the point of studying linguistics? Part of the reason I feel like I have to justify this is that my culture, reflected in my upbringing, favours “hard” sciences as noble fields—medicine, physics—or fields with obvious practical applications—software engineering, finance....