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, writing systems
- Understanding language: User based and use 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, multilingualism in the European Union
- 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
Undergraduate students (Y21 Batch) at IIT Kanpur
Outcomes of this Course
The objective of the course is to sensitize students to the sociocultural dimension of language and language use.