Course Description
The course investigates the relationship between language, cognition and culture.
Course Content
- Introductory: What do Linguists do?
- Defining Language: Different perspectives on the study of language, language and a language, language as a cognitive and geo-political construct, individuating a language anatomy of speech, wring systems
- Understanding language: Language based and language user-based perspectives
- Language and other communication systems: Artificial languages and animal communication systems
- Language variation: social and linguistic stratification, ethnic, caste, age and gender varieties in language, emergence of new languages, salvaging dying languages
- Multilingual communities: dominance, shift and attrition, language and the state, Indian multilingualism
- Language and identity: language choice and linguistic identities, linguistic prejudice and inequality, standardization, language disadvantage in education
- Language, culture and cognition: cross-linguistic semantic choices, translatability across cultures, linguistic relativity
- Language and social control: language and power, gendered language, post truth social order
Course Audience
IIT Kanpur Undergraduate Students
Outcomes of this Course
The objective of the course is to sensitize students to the sociocultural dimension of language and language use.