 Hi, my name is Shobana Chalaya. I'm a linguist and you may ask, what is linguistics? What does it mean to be a linguist? Well, you may have noticed that we all have language. We all use words and sentences to communicate with each other. So it seems like just we see study walking and breathing and doing other human things. We'd like to know more about language and it's something that everybody does all over the world. So we're very interested in how human beings use language, how they learn language and what are all the different types of languages that are out there? How are they similar? How are they different? And so, just from a very curiosity kind of perspective and trying to understand human beings and human behavior, that's what linguists do. They ask those questions about language. So that's one thing about telling you what linguistics is. There's another thing about linguistics. There's an applied side to it and I'm interested in the applied side as well. The applied side says, if we know more about language, what are the good things we can do for society and for each other? Well, many of you may be speakers of languages from Nagaland. If we know more about your languages, we'll know more about you and your histories and the people who speak them and your parents and your grandparents. So if you know linguistics, then you can document your language and you can document your culture and you can tell the world about all the great things that are happening here. So as a linguist, I try to do that myself and I do it with the languages that are spoken in money for it. I know lots of my friends are there and I want to tell their story by telling more about their language and I can do that by recording their language and by archiving and telling everybody where those archived materials are so they can access that material on their phone and learn more about those cultures. So I am a specific type of linguist. I'm a documentary linguist and I create a lasting record of interesting languages around the world. All languages are interesting, but I'm interested in Northeast Indian languages because they're really pretty cool. They've got some cool structures in them. So what are those structures? That's another kind of thing that linguists might do. They might break up a language into smaller parts, find out how the words are constructed, find out how the sentences are constructed. It's like a puzzle. So if you take a linguistics class and you like doing Sudoku or you like doing crossword puzzles, you will love doing linguistics. You have to learn the tricks of the language of linguistics and then you can apply it on data and try to figure out what is the puzzle and how does the language work, what are the rules, predictable rules of usages, what we call them. So linguists try to figure out what those predictive rules are and who cares about that. People who work with computers and language care a lot. They want to know what are the predictive things that happen in language because they can use that to then get a machine to translate language very easily or they can get a machine to understand what we're saying and then replicate it like you know how you speak into your phone and then it answers you. You say, Google, show me where the nearest cafe is and then Google understands you. That's because somebody, some great linguist somewhere, taught Google about the words that go into telling that machine what those things mean. So predictive rules of language are very useful for just the fun of doing puzzles, but there's an application to it as well. So probably the final thing that I can talk about then is another reason why predictive rules are easy or useful is because you can then teach people how to speak your language. If you don't have predictive rules, how do you figure out how to speak the language? It's very difficult, but all languages have predictive rules and we can put them into grammars and dictionaries and those can be used to learn the language both for people who are community members as well as people outside of the community. So those are some great reasons to do linguistics and there are lots more and you can look them up on different websites. Just Google, why should I learn linguistics? What are the careers in linguistics? And I don't know, is it cool to be a linguist? Obviously it's cool to be a linguist. A lot of cool linguists around. Okay, I hope you're all linguists and I see you somewhere in the future at a linguistics conference. Bye.