![]() |
See the red car? It needs to travel all the way to the right. |
![]() |
My attempt at a panorama to show our room from our door. The ceilings and floor don't really slope like that... |
The Summer Institute of Linguistics (or SIL) is hosted by the University of North Dakota, on their campus in Grand Forks, North Dakota. It provides advanced training in linguistics and literacy, especially focusing on areas of language development and pioneering work in minority people groups (i.e., where do you start with a language that has never been written down?). It is nine intense weeks of listening to every sound imaginable (literally), reading textbooks written by internationally-renowned authorities (who also happen to be your professors), holding long discussions in the dorm hallways about syntax, and quizzing your lunch neighbors about how they pronounce aunt. The demographics are not the typical college campus—two-week-old babies, college freshmen, and 50-year-field experts live down the dorm hall from each other, and with less than 200 people total, relationships quickly develop as you eat, sleep, and brush your teeth together.
![]() |
The dorms where many of us live |
What’s it like? For many, it’s like slipping on that perfect pair of Chacos after coming from a $2 pair of plastic flipflops from Walmart. Other sandals might do, but nothing is quite like that moment where you realize that you are among a family of colleagues who ask the same questions, think the same way, and are willing to spend hours alongside you picking apart a morphology for fun.
I had the opportunity to attend back in 2009, and now I’m returning at the graduate level for my final linguistic training before I head to PNG in August. I can’t tell you how wonderful it is to be back! This year I’m taking three courses:
- Phonology—one instructor described this as the CSI (Crime Scene Investigation) of language: we look at the results of sounds colliding, merging and interacting with each other and try to figure out what happened. <enter cool TV music>
- Typology and Discourse—this is a two-part class, looking at the classification of phenomena in language (typology) as well as the analysis of larger blocks of text or speaking (discourse)
- Field Methods—this course pulls everything together as we analyze a language in all its aspects and practice working as if we were on the field.
![]() |
It's the cooley (the odd name for the creek running through campus)! |
It’s going to be a great summer!