After a five-year hiatus, the UCA linguistics club held its first meeting of the semester Jan. 14.
Junior linguistics major Kyle Urban re-established the linguistics club to bring more awareness to linguistics as a major as well as the opportunities that the field can provide.
“The linguistics major is pretty top-heavy,” Urban said. “We have a lot of seniors; a lot of juniors, but we don’t have a lot of freshmen and sophomores, so I would like to leverage the club to encourage more freshmen who are maybe looking for an interdisciplinary route in their educational career to consider linguistics.”
Urban said, “I really urge computer science majors to maybe think about picking up an intro linguistics course. Natural language processing is becoming an important field and is continuing to grow. It would be good if you have that experience, because you never know what you could be doing five, ten years down the road in the corporate environment.”
Of the ten people in attendance at the meeting, eight were linguistics majors, one was a public administration major and one was a religious studies major. Six attendees were upperclassmen and four were freshmen.
“Linguistics is a humanities, but it’s a very scientific humanities,” Urban said. “It’s a needed and growing field in this modern world, especially with the rise of language models, and, as the media would say, advanced AI, so it’s a field that’s needed and it should be explored.”
Urban sees the linguistics club as becoming a hotspot for students to develop research and presentational skills.
“I hope that long term, we can see the linguistics club as a place for students to soapbox and to otherwise give presentations,” Urban said.
Urban intends for the linguistics club to “provide a sense of community; maybe some language or cultural events, especially because what I feel is sometimes people get hit and hold in their specific language, or, like, you know, their language of study, and they don’t want to see the other options.”
Urban hopes that the linguistics club will serve as a mode to facilitate intersection between students studying various languages who may not otherwise be exposed to instruction in other languages.
“[I] have many friends [who] are studying Japanese, and studying German when we still had it,” Urban said. “It’s like, I’m over here with Spanish as my minor, and they’re all like, ‘Ah, you’re just doing Spanish.’ And it’s like, ‘Well, you don’t want to jump over to my language.’ It would just help to have more crossing.”
Future club ventures proposed were the creation of an International Phonetic Alphabet Scrabble, holding networking and board game events between students and collaborating with other RSOs such as Team Global to hold language and culture events.
Meetings for the Spring 2025 semester will be held during x-period in Irby 201 Jan. 30, Feb. 13, Feb. 27, March 6, March 20, April 3, April 17, and April 24.
