Sounds and Sound Patterns in Twelve Languages
ENG408, Fall 2021
Project Description
This book is co-authored by the twelve students who were enrolled in ENG 408 Phonetics and Phonology at SIUE. They have researched and reported on the phonetics and phonology of a specific language of their choosing. They have each authored their own chapter, and the table of contents of this digital book, including chapter titles and authors, is listed below. The students of ENG 408 have worked on their chosen language of focus throughout the semester, with an initial check-in, a final presentation, and the “publication” of their chapter after final revisions. You can learn more about the authors by clicking on the “Contributor Biographies” link.
This is an applied project, meaning that students had the opportunity to apply the terms, descriptions, discussions, generalizations and debates covered in class to an actual, living language. The goal here is to learn something new about other languages through the lens of the topics we cover in the class. Students began with audio files and phonetically transcribed word examples provided through the UCLA Phonetics Lab Archive, which houses recordings from hundreds of languages from around the world. After choosing a focus language based on the availability of audio files and transcriptions, each student gathered reference materials from Lovejoy Library and through online searches.
Rather than writing a traditional (conventional) paper-based research paper, this project has been structured using a locally hosted instance of Scalar, to resemble a digital book (which looks in some ways like a web page, but allows for organization and referencing that looks more like an edited book). Students are the authors of their own chapter contributions. As a result, the projects will have a parallel structure for easy comparison, but will also reflect the unique efforts and styles of each student author. This digital book structure also allows students to include different types of media, including sound files, videos and images to more effectively illustrate particular sounds and patterns. In many cases, students also worked with audio editing (Audacity) and acoustic analysis software (Praat) to visualize particular phonetic and phonological phenomena.