 Thank you for coming. I'm a big thank you to all our visitors and thank you very much Julia. My name is Yan Zhang and I work as lecturer in linguistics. I teach for this undergraduate program I teach introduction to linguistics and we're having a quite a large number of students for this year almost reaching 40 and I will also take part in some other modules like semantics and also I supervise independent study projects. Thank you very much Julia. How about Chris next? Okay thank you Julia. Hello everyone my name is Chris Lucas. I'm a senior lecturer in Arabic linguistics. I studied Arabic at SAS and I also as part of my Arabic degree at SAS I did some linguistics. It was actually taught by Lutz Martin who will introduce himself next and Lutz is such a good teacher and linguistics is such a good subject that I knew that was what I wanted to do from then on. So yes I teach in the linguistics department where I've taught historical linguistics and linguistic typology in the past and I also teach Arabic various modules in in Arabic. Okay Lutz. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you Julia. Hello everyone. Thank you Chris. Yeah it takes me back a while and general linguistics I think it was in those days. Yeah I'm Lutz Martin. I'm half in you know I used to be half in the linguistics department and half in the African languages and cultures department that now of course we're all merged in one big family but my interest and that reflects my interest so I work on linguistics mainly on the structure and meaning side to syntax semantics pragmatics and and on African languages and I'm teaching this year I think languages of the world which is a big first-year module it's really nice I think yeah and I think last year we even had more I think we had like almost 60 students because we are joined by a number of language degree students and it's really a nice module it was the first time we taught it last year so this this year will be the second time and I really enjoyed it last year and then I'm also like Chris I'm teaching historical linguistics so that we you know we alternate there a little bit and I'm also teaching a module called language identity in society in Africa which has a particular Africa focus and links actually cried a bit with the with the work Julia is doing in here's a module language society communication which I think we come to in the moment so yeah great welcome everyone and I'm happy to answer questions in little bits. Okay thank you very much. Do we have any other teaching colleagues here or should I talk about myself and yeah normally this talk is given by Maria Flouaki who is the BA Cabina but she has to teach at this at this time so I volunteered to do it this time yeah so I'm Julia Salabank as I said and my specialism is social linguistics and endangered languages we focus more on endangered languages at the MA level so at BA level I teach as what's said a module called language society communication which is another very popular module and it attracts a lot of students from other other disciplines as well so we look at one of the features I'm going to talk about is the interdisciplinarity of our linguistic study here at SOAS because our our linguistics degree is a joint degree so you you could only redo it in combination with an other discipline. Yeah so I look at language society how language relates to different context in which language is spoken and how language changes according to what context it's in to do with things like gender, age, region, class and so on and also I'm very interested in motions of language identity and particularly language policy and language planning so all the little bits of this coming into my module as well. Anyway so okay I'm not going to share my screen and give you a presentation a bit more detail about what we do here and then as I said very welcome to ask questions at the end preferably. If you want to you can type questions to the chat if you don't feel happy about talking yourselves or is that we can either read them out or we can ask you to talk to your own question as well okay so here we go with the screenshot. Okay here we go. Yes okay linguistic at SOAS welcome. Yes so welcome to the School of Languages Cutters and Linguistics which is now the home of the linguistics department at SOAS. So what's different about studying at SOAS? Well first of all we had our 100th anniversary just a few years ago and we've been focusing specifically on scholarship regarding Africa and Asia therefore for over a hundred years and we teach over 30 languages and of course languages and linguistics have a very close relationship. We have a national research library it gets government funding because it is a library of international importance and we also actually are the oldest linguistics department in the UK founded in 1932 but of course what we teach has developed over the years and so we keep track of latest developments too but we're also grounded in this long history of research and teaching and linguistics. We have students and staff over 130 countries so it's a very diverse environment and this is really important about SOAS and we're in a really vibrant part of London as well and so we have expertise in many of the world's key regions and languages including those which have the highest linguistic diversity I'll come back to that later and we have as I said a number of degree combinations available but we have two main programs for BA students firstly is simply the BA in linguistics focuses mainly on the key areas of linguistics formal linguistics I'll come back to those later and we have a BA in linguistics with a focus on translation studies and both of these can be combined with a whole range of other subjects such as Arabic Chinese development studies East Asian studies Japanese Korean languages and cultures which is the generic program for the whole department. You can also combine linguistics with politics as my own field is particularly interested in that and with social anthropology so as I said the BA in linguistics both with and without the translation pathway together with another degree that the linguistics part of that focuses mainly on structural and theoretical linguistics the core foundations of linguistics. We also have quite a relevant focus on language and society as I said I teach that module we also have historical linguistics we are I think one of the few places in London to actually fill up over time and language identity in Africa as Lutz mentioned already. We do focus specifically on the languages of Africa Asia and the Middle East but we do have additional expertise amongst the staff in the department in various other languages such as European Australian and American languages so we have a big a wide range of examples that we can draw on in our teaching and as I mentioned of your UK's oldest linguistics department we have to go playing on about that too. So what do we study in linguistics? We focus as I said on basic structures of language so first of all through sounds and the sub-disciplines of linguistics which study sounds are phonetics, phonology and prosody so phonetics are the individual sounds in words and how we make them how we produce them in our mouths. Phonology is more about sounds in their context within words and within a whole utterance or sentence and prosody is how your intonation how your speech goes up and down depending on various aspects and this is different for different languages and then we look at the grammar of language it is not in any order we do all of these all through your whole your whole career so us so we talk at the grammar and structure of how languages work looking at the morphology that's the shape of words, word classes, how words behave and how they might change according to what part of speech they are there in part of a sentence they're in, I'm trying to be kind of simple about this and syntax which is the word order how and that can tell you a lot of things all of these together can tell you a lot of things about what someone is trying to say and how they're trying to say it and then we have meanings of the word semantics you may have heard the word semantics in a more kind of lay sense, yes semantics is particularly about the meanings of words and pragmatics is how that relates to how words are used and that kind of overlaps with the use of language which is also another sub-area of linguistics particularly relating to my area of socioequistics so pragmatics is part of that things like politeness studies, how we get over what we want to say, discourse can be looked at in various ways, discourse in principle is language above the sentence level of over say a paragraph or longer text but it also to do with how people construct their identities through talk and through language and language in the social world how as I mentioned earlier how language might change or how people might express themselves in a particular way depending on on the context in which they're speaking so overall what we're interested in is how languages work and for those of us obviously who went into the business of Korea this is we find this totally fascinating so I'm going to talk a little bit about the structure of the program you have to take a certain number of modules and in as this is a joint degree these modules will be divided between linguistics and whatever other subject you're taking so this is we only need to have enough credits for for a half degree in linguistics itself you have core modules ones you have to take and pass if you're to progress to the next year but you also have a number of options the first year though is has what we call a guided curriculum so we if you like take the decisions for you so that you have the basics of knowledge that you can use to possibly use take more options in years two and three so as Jan mentioned we have introduction to linguistics tells you but you need to know in order to understand the other modules languages of the world which is the one that looks teachers sounds grammar and meaning in language which is a little bit more about about what I was talking about earlier the the the basic building blocks of language and that's taught by Maria Fliraki who can't be here today unfortunately and then we have language learning and writing which is an introduction to how to do academic work in in language study that's a kind of academic studies module which is something that is very useful when you when you do more assessments later assignments later in your academic career okay so going on to link year two in the purely linguistics pathway you will take the core modules approaches syntax introduction to research and meaning and interpretation and these go into the topics you were studying in year one in more specific detail if you're doing a translation pathway you that then you will then also you then start to focus more on translation itself introduction to translation theory introduction to research which is common across across all of our subjects and then particularly focusing on on how to translate cultures a culture is a really really core element of translation to what extent can you translate cultures as to what extent are languages translated well it's a big really a big theme in translation studies and then understanding texts because a lot of translation focuses on literary translation then of course you have options we'll come back to the options later in year three or year four because if you're doing a a language in in in in at the same time as linguistics you you you will probably do a year abroad as part of your degrees so year four will be your final year or your final year will be in your fourth year um in um the sorry um water um if you're doing the linguistics pathway you will do something called advanced topics in linguistics um and that um to a certain extent can can be a choice of yours and also of the person who's teaching that at the time and then you can do an independent study in linguist an independent study project in linguistics and that is now compulsory for uh pure linguistics students and that gives you the opportunity to do a to spend the whole year um doing original research or doing a little bit of original study um or perhaps some literature based or some desk based study on a a topic which has which has grabbed you something which you found really interesting over the first two or three years of your of your academic career and the translation pathway because you you had more core modules in in the previous year they really the the main core module in year three or year four as it as it may be will be translation technology which is a very useful module for people who are intending to go on to do translation as the as a career and that's this is kind of up-to-date stuff about the latest technological advances in translation and and the tools that you can use to help with your translations again plus options so we have two lists of options list a and list b and these are the ones that we kind of recommend to students who are doing linguistics but of course there are also open options throughout the university and options which and options which are available as part of your other subject as well so as I mentioned there's a language society in communication which is what I teach meaning interpretation I think taught by our colleague Isabel Cudi to come back to that I'll check that if you like um introduction to Arabic dialects which is taught by Chris translation theory is an option for those who are doing straight linguistics and philosophies of languages and is another option related to linguistics which is taught by our colleagues in the history philosophy and religions department and then in the final year you have options such as historical linguistics it's a final year one because you need to know a certain amount of linguistics to in order just to follow that linguistic typology likewise and your independent study project that's if if you're not taking that as a compulsory as or as a core module then you can you can do it as an option if if you so wish and all of us for all of us who have been talking to you and all of our other colleagues are available to to supervise independent study projects in linguistics and if you're interested if you do have something which is simply interesting to you please please talk to us at an early stage and we can help you to guide the development of your research project we also have as I mentioned a large number of languages that we teach so as as well as the major world languages such as Chinese and Japanese and Arabic and Korean as and Japanese we also have what are called strategically important and vulnerable languages which is a government category for languages which are taught less often but which are of particular interest or particular importance in the world and you can see these range from Amharic to Vietnamese in terms of the English alphabet oh and Zulu as well eight eight is it even okay so and and anything from Persian, Persian, Turkish, Hebrew or do Indonesian there's a lot of languages to choose from and if you're doing linguistics it's really fruitful to try to combine that with with with some language study because it really helps you to appreciate how languages work and and to to have insight into a language which is not of the same language family as one you've studied before is a really interesting thing to do if you're interested in how languages work okay so if you're interested in studying here we do have entry requirements so in the UK the A level the advanced level and school leaving examinations we require ABBs so A and one and B into the if you have particular issues then we are willing to drop that to BBB but you'll have to talk to talk to our admissions people about that and various places around the world there are accepted equivalents for the the levels of that we require and these are various options from various countries so international baccalaureate if you take that you need 35 points if you take the European baccalaureate you need 60 80 percent sorry the German Arbitur A level equivalent you'll need a level two and if you if your qualifications come from um anywhere else you'll need to talk to our admissions people or there are also standard um um calculations which which try to work out the equivalents of qualifications across the world so please please talk to our admissions department um if if you need some more information about your your qualifications and our entry requirements okay um so I thought I talked a little bit about language the kind of things that you may study right at the beginning I know that well possibly some of you may be doing a level in English language which also gives you a very good introduction to the basics of linguistics um but um yeah just sort of a little little taster of the kind of things that may be covered um in in in our in our courses so um first of all about the sounds grammar and meaning the basic building blocks of language as I said earlier um so we need to understand the components of language in order really to understand what's going on in language so what are the basic components of a sentence and how to work the words relate to each other in a sentence this is this is um really what what we're talking about with regards to a syntax and and um and and word formation okay so um one of the areas that we study is phrase structure how um a particular utterance may be structured and how words go together um to make meaning um and how you put those how you how you put those words together in particular groups can make a big difference to to the um to the meaning of your sentence there's a there's a book um that is very famous for this um about this it's called eats shoots and leaves and it's got a picture of a panda with a gun on the front um so a panda eats shoots and um well bamboo shoots and leaves um so that's one meaning of that of the of the title of that book um but if you put a comma after the eats uh it might mean that the panda had a meal shot somebody and then left okay so with that in mind here's another example from from Maria um so if you said she fed her piranha fish fingers um some people actually do keep piranhas as pets um strangely enough um okay so the simple meaning you might think of straight away um what would i would originally immediately think of of of sea here so she fed fishing good fish fingers to the piranha but um you could her could actually refer to someone else someone who's not named but might have been named in in the previous part of the conversation so she might she might have fed another woman fish fingers made of piranhas because piranha was a kind of fish then again um if she wasn't very careful um and actually dipped her hand into the into the fish tank uh she might have find she might then find that her piranha fish actually ate her fingers so we can have a bit of fun playing with language and i've got another example on the next slide okay so here is a sign that you may see in various places around the UK um yeah which perhaps uh have more formal uh parkland keep off the grass so that the they sent they that would seem to be a fairly simple um or order it's um it's its communicative purpose is is is to tell people to do something or actually not to do something not to go on on the grass but maybe maybe the grass is being regrown because uh if too many people walked over it or it got very dry and they needed to be receded okay so this is a two word so you've got a verb phrase and a noun phrase within this within this um utterance within this um order within this command okay so you've got keep off which is a two word verb phrase and the grass which is uh a noun phrase consisting of a definite article the and a noun grass okay so you can deconstruct it in that way grammatically um and then you can um think about an analogous um sentence um for example turn off the tap um it has a common two words in common with the previous sentence off and there and it would also consist of a two word verb verb phrase and a two word noun phrase turn off it's what we call in English a phrasal verb because it's it's got both a verb and um what's that uh preposition I think um and the tap which again is a definite article the and a thing a tap something which you turn on and off um in order to let water to come out let water come out or not as the case may be um and you will see this sometimes in in public restrooms or bathrooms um turn off the tap so that we don't waste water okay so you could turn that round and the meaning will pretty will be the same in English it turn the tap off um but if you then uh turned around the first sentence keep the grass off um unless uh it's you're you're being a bit really funny then that's kind of pretty nonsense sentence and the and this content in this context the the the asterisk is um means that it's a it's a non-feasible sentence it's something that um doesn't really happen in in normal speech you see very interesting things that we can uh find out or and do with languages right you know right from the very start okay um so a little bit more about what we study um we're very interested in linguistic variation and in the in the diversity of languages around the world and many of us study not only the major languages of the world um not only the strategically important languages but we also study highly uh endangered or very small languages uh for various countries or or in Chris's case case case for example different dialects of Arabic as as they're called um and from from different parts of the Arabic language continuum but um what what we know is that Africa and Asia contain the most linguistically diverse countries in the world and you can see the red the red spots here are the areas where you get the highest level of linguistic diversity and we teach languages from all of these areas of the world go on to the next slide or next kind of point so these these these are particularly language that are taught taught by our department languages cultures and linguistics because east Asian languages are taught by another department that may change in it so in our view these are the world's most linguistically interesting countries because they have a lot of linguistic diversity okay um and you can see that many of the endangered language hotspots are the the the the at the hot the places in the world where there are lots of very small languages which are likely to disappear in in the foreseeable future um these many of these are in the areas of the world that we study but um when we look at endangered languages we also look at languages from around the world because we find that there are common processes going on um in or in all in all parts of the world when what what people where people are shifting from one language to another and that may not actually just be in exotic places if you like but it also happens in places like London where where a lot of there are perhaps up to 300 languages spoken in London but many of those um many people are shifting across generations from those languages to English okay right and these are some of the the endangered language hotspots in the areas that we study particularly so why should we study linguistics well we think it's fascinating we hope you'll find it's fascinating too um i guess you're in this in this session because you really have um uh some interest in linguistics but also because it has many practical applications and we also we do get asked a lot about career options in linguistics so you can go into things like speech therapy artificial intelligence um actually one is not mentioned here um i've known um if you use a mobile phone it's got a dictionary installed and that has been developed by linguists um i know linguists who work for google and amazon on on um on their um linguistic databases constantly updating um how how your predictive texts or can can work or how uh the dictionary on your kindle works for example um languages are also very important for marketing um there's actually quite a lot of research into the language of marketing which is very interesting um in law um language rights um the uh the rights of migrants um for example chris is doing some very interesting research on on linguistic determination of origin in in in um immigration cases um many non-government organizations um find it find it very helpful to have people who have studied linguistics and languages uh i personally used with oxfam um i studied french and german at university and i did use particularly the french uh because many parts of africa use french but it's much much um more useful in in in many parts of africa to be able to use local languages to really get to make contact with local people um civil services again often use people who um speak different languages um particularly translating um rules and and and um agreements from different from different countries um um teaching um not only so-called modern european languages are taught in schools but increasingly languages like chinese japanese and arabic are taught in the uk as well um and also of course translation is is a whole career in its own right okay so why should you study linguistics linguistics at sewers in particular well i mentioned the diversity the diversity of the languages studied much more interesting than some of the universities so only do french and german for example um the background of the students and all this also the staff i mentioned we have students of staff from at least 130 different countries um and and at least 50 percent of our southern students are not from a uk background so we have a lot of insight into what happens in other countries as i said we have degree combinations so you can study linguistics in an interdisciplinary manner so you can combine that with with with insights um um from both areas of your study to to to reach new heights if you like and we have uh an interesting range of modules offered i i mentioned those earlier um so hang on i think i have um yeah okay so right yeah sorry about that so this is the last slide why do we study linguistics um yes we have a passion for it yes most of us have had a lifelong fascination for it um but from the from your point of view they're not necessarily so important yet um we would like you to develop that you may get to go to africa as if you study in african language but that's not really the point of studying linguistics either um but really what we're looking at is to find out how language works um and that's that that's the core really the core aspects of linguistics so thank you very much for listening to me i'm going um and thank so yeah please ask any questions um i can see there's something in the chat um what are language languages we teach oh interesting okay okay um i'll just gonna i'm gonna stop the sharing um and open up this to everyone else as well okay so we have one question from um samuel um is everyone okay if i just answer that one first okay okay the the short answer is is no um so um we don't necessarily teach language endangered languages as languages as as the full language study itself as as to speak those languages what we do is we study the process of language endangerment um and also of language revitalization so we're looking at how languages become endangered um the process of language shift but also what we can do to try and stop that both in terms of linguistic documentation um that is recording and um archiving um languages uh to keep them um in a safe place if you like future generations but also what what people are trying to do on the ground what communities trying to do do not in order to to to arrest to halt that process of language shift and also to reverse it so no we don't have a predetermined selection um but what we do often find is the students will choose a language uh which is a particular interest to them for so for example one of the uh previous undergrads um did a study a a particular study on revitalization of the anu language in japan and i've actually got a phd student looking at that at the moment as well another student did a study of bus which is an endangered language in spain not a not a nation or african language but as i said we do actually look at the processes of that in in all the countries of the world okay um is anybody else got a question okay jenny okay jenny sorry i didn't ask you samuel if you wanted to say yourself jenny do you want to say this yourself or or would you like me to read out your question okay so if you don't want to unmute i'll i'll i'll i'll i'll see the question and then colleagues are welcome to jump in um okay so jenny uh can't remember if you mentioned it i'm particularly interested in how children learn the language and how learning a second language is different is that something you look at um um lutz do you want you're nodding there do you want to talk to that yes i think it's a great question actually i just think also also chris probably has more more to say about that as well but one thing which immediately came to my mind is that that it links to to multilingualism which is really a very very important feature of the world's languages i mean we tend to forget in europe but actually there's so many languages also in london but in in many in many parts of the world we do research it's it's really defining feature of the ecology of the of the environment in which you operate that there's just many languages um and and part of my work i'm really quite interested um what the effects of that when you have the situation where people speak two or three languages and some of them are first languages so they are quite very early on in childhood they are the peer language if they spoke at home and then you add add to that repertoire if you like um and then maybe the second or third language in some states becomes actually quite important and then the the influence of second or third language because on the language itself so i'm think particularly of sohili and and chris has you know a similar work on arabic and indeed yin has worked quite a bit on that in the chinese continent so in the sense we converge on precisely that question and then the question of what what is the difference between first and language first language acquisition second language and what it means to bring knowledge of first language if you like to the second language um and indeed how maybe also the second language then influence your first language is precisely that sort of space which many of us are interested in and that i don't think we have specific modules on that for teaching but it sort of permits a lot of this work we do so for historical linguistics it's a really important question for example okay shall i just just just to sort of follow up on that yeah i mean uh just to sort of echo what look said i if you consider the the um point that julia made at the end of her presentation what's the main reason for studying linguistics it's to try to understand how languages work well if you break that point down uh an absolutely key component of understanding how languages work is understanding how we come to learn languages whether it's children or as adults so what you'll find is that this question of language acquisition as we call it whether whether the acquisition of first languages by children or second languages by older children and adults what you'll find is that that is actually at lies really at the heart of a huge proportion of research that is done in linguistics and around the world so we will often in many modules come back to this question we don't however have a dedicated module devoted to first or second language acquisition but um you know it's it's it's it's almost so fundamental that we're you're going to come across it in many of the modules nevertheless okay thank you very much so jenny again so would linguistics be better or linguistics central translation to get a better understanding of it it's it's jenny but by it do you mean language acquisition or or or linguistics language acquisition okay i would say probably in linguistics translation doesn't really deal with with with language acquisition translation is more about how to how different languages relate to each other and to what extent it's possible to say the same thing in another language and and the processes you would use to to go about doing that i just to say on the on this issue of you know if you're interested in in what julia has presented and you like the idea of coming to science to study linguistics in in some form should you do the straight linguistics pathway or should you do the translation pathway well um if of course you already know that you're particularly interested in translation well then you should of course uh choose the translation pathway um uh the point is that um as julia showed you once you have a degree in linguistics uh there are a number of different avenues that you can go down career-wise building on your um on the skills and knowledge that you've acquired doing linguistics and one of those many options open to you uh is uh working in translation assuming of course that you um have expert knowledge of two at least two languages that you can translate between um and so the translation pathway really just uh gives you an option to focus from well not from the very beginning from from your second year once you know once we've established the foundations in the first year that gives you an opportunity um to to focus on translation especially from a sort of career-oriented point of view early on um but like I say um there are many different things you can do with linguistics so if you uh aren't so sure that you want to specialize in translation then maybe choose the um general linguistics pathway which of course doesn't uh mean that you've turned your back on translation forever uh it's it uh you can always do uh master's qualification in translation uh or something like that yeah yeah or you could do translation modules as some of your options for for a general linguistics degree as well yeah um so just going back to I assume you've got another question um um so just going back to Jenny's question again not on language acquisition and kind of relating that to the individual study projects and also study projects in various of the other uh modules because in several of our modules you get an opportunity to to to look at a a particular area in in more detail uh for example my my module on language society and communication you're encouraged to do a little bit of of original research for that as well and to choose choose something what we often find is students come along with a particular interest but actually over the period of time that they're at sewers they they find out about so many other things that they actually end up going in a different direction um so it's really important to have that overall basis uh grounding in in in the kind of the basics of linguistics first so that you can make choices at a later stage and but say you did have an interest in a particular area maybe language acquisition maybe uh syntax maybe maybe language policy and planning for example you um what you could do is talk to a member of staff who's got the expertise in that particular area and do an individual study project on that and that's a way of of developing um what you've done as part of your basic degree into into something of you can either use individual study project to go more deeply into a ticket area if you've already studied or you can branch out into another area or a sub a subfield of what you're studying okay so yeah please talk to us at any at any stage of your career about about we have we have what's called academic advisors who are there to help you uh to decide about choices modules and modules but also and other areas of your life too okay so and and there was another question from Samuel in the chat okay so we're being able being able to speak multiple languages be a benefit for the course um yes absolutely because it gives you an insight already a little bit if you have been learning languages or if you have um languages as part of your heritage you already have an insight into into how different languages are structured and how and how you say the same thing in different languages and that's a really interesting um um um thing you know an every interesting basis in order to to to kind of knowledge in order to go into linguistics I actually have um actually I don't think we have anyone not in my classes who isn't by a multilingual um I mean this is one of the things about the service it's it is so diverse and we and we have students from so many places and so many backgrounds um I I think I have about 40 different languages spoken in in one of my modules that I teach by by the by the students so in it and that gives us a really interesting range of examples that we can look at when when we're relating what we what we're teaching to what happens in real life but sorry if I can just come come in there I think it's really interesting both both this question but also Jenny's earlier question about the about the language acquisition um because the the languages we teach I think all of them are up initial that is the their beginners level so they don't presuppose that you've done you know Chinese or or Swahili at school you can't you can't do Swahili at school I don't think um but that that means there's a there's lots of opportunity for language learning but there's also lots of language learners so I was just thinking Julia when you were talking about the independent study project at the end if you're interested in language acquisition there's a whole group of people who would would be really nice to work with and and you know maybe trace you know a cohort of Sanskrit students say and and work with them and maybe you know ask them about their their their their approach to the language learning the questions of identity and the motivation behind it maybe talk to language language teachers and you know I mean they are busy people of course but they will probably be interested as well actually if you if you come with it with a theoretical question so I think in that context you know the whole you know the wider context of Swahili that there's so much language learning and language teaching going on and also helps for asking those questions about language acquisition I think and and of course also if you're interested in language learning there's plenty of opportunities to do that as well and just to add one small thing there I mean maybe you know maybe being a little pedantic here you ask would being able to speak multiple languages be a benefit for the course I mean sure it would but I think the most beneficial thing for linguistics um and getting ideas for uh what to what to investigate in linguistics for your essays for example is to be a current language learner um you know if you if you've grown up bilingual wealth fantastic that that that is definitely definitely a benefit but languages that you speak natively often I mean I know this myself I only speak English natively and it my speech in English doesn't really happen at the level of sort of conscious thought it just it just comes out and it can actually be more difficult to sort of scrutinize the way your native language works than it is to do the same for a language that you're learning as an adult so yeah so the answer is is great if you can already speak multiple languages but it's really really great to continue to learn more languages or deepen your knowledge of languages you already know something about okay thank you Chris um okay we have about 10 minutes left um so I just um a question now about Arabic there um but Jenny also has a question about Chinese along with linguistics can I pass that over to Yen to um because you're a specialist in in Chinese linguistics hi yes um we do have uh all our BA programs as BA linguistics plus another area so in your case you're obviously interested in learning Chinese as your joint degree um think that at the Department of East Asian Languages and cultures of our colleagues in that department will teach you modules in Chinese language which will be rather intensive and you're likely to spend your third year in some part of the Chinese speaking regions learning intensifying your Chinese but we from the linguistic side as my colleague Chris um has told you that uh we will deliver knowledge related to linguistics and in our modules um more than what several of us will teach some linguistic phenomena related to Chinese so you will have the opportunity of turning linguistic ideas into Chinese language studies when you do your independent study um project and also we will integrate some part of that language knowledge into our linguistic courses it's a good opportunity to do it here because there are the Chinese languages as so commonly taught at service thank you very much I see there's there's two questions there involving Arabic which I'm I'm happy to answer and just first of all following up on on what Yan said so um one thing one thing that it might be important to explain um is that um from from the let's say from a more sort of bureaucratic administrative point of view uh what you should understand is that if you do a degree at SOAS in say linguistics and Chinese um it what you're doing is you're doing half a degree in linguistics and half a degree in Chinese and um those two halves from from from the administrative point of view are separate and um are not they don't uh influence each other so as that is to say um the linguistics that you do uh in a degree that combines linguistics and Chinese is in principle not not different to or doesn't have to be different to the linguistics you do in combination with Arabic or Japanese or any other language so uh now of course within uh both halves of your degree there's there's quite a lot of freedom and flexibility for you to explore the avenues that are of most interest to you and we would of course uh encourage you to um take every opportunity uh you can and there will be many opportunities to combine to sort of fruitfully combine the two halves of your degree so if you're doing uh linguistics and Arabic then you know we we encourage you to draw on uh the the experience of learning Arabic uh in your uh when when writing your essays for linguistics and so on um okay um now all right let me let me read this question if you want to do Arabic it's an optional module on translation theory oh yes yes yes okay so yes if you um um if you're if you're overwhelming uh priority is to get as good as you possibly can at Arabic or another language we teach at Sylas then uh with a heavy heart I have to have to admit that uh your your best bet in that case is to do single subject Arabic or Chinese or whatever it is uh because when you do uh a joint degree um you you over the course of the three years that you're at Sylas um you don't do more modules overall than you would have done if you had done a single subject degree like BA Arabic um so you will end up doing more Arabic modules if you do single subject Arabic than if you do Arabic and linguistics but there's a very big but after after having made that clear um and that is that um it's it's not that you will do it's not that you will do half as much Arabic if you combine it with linguistics compared to if you did single subject Arabic you you'll do uh less Arabic but not you know 50% less because uh if you do a single subject uh degree in the second and third years uh you are basic you are basically required to do open options which means um these are modules that come from uh uh other parts of Sylas um so not that they those wouldn't be Arabic modules um now if you combine Arabic and linguistics then um there's then those open option module slots will be filled with linguistics you see so um it it it's not the linguistics uh sort of eclipses the Arabic not at all uh the other thing to say is um I would argue that uh studying linguistics really uh has very tangible benefits when it comes to language learning it it massively increases your ability to uh understand the grammar of the language basically uh and many many students find when they're learning a language be it's Arabic Chinese Japanese or whatever uh but uh the grammar is the hardest part um and uh you know I've I've seen this I've seen this with many students myself um it's possible to get sort of to feel overwhelmed by the grammar of these non-european languages uh and linguistics gives you the tools uh to not be overwhelmed but to break it all down logically and um to uh uh not struggle with learning grammar um also sorry Chris if I may just briefly of course if you combine with the language degree with the full language degree there's also the year abroad so so you would to year one and year two say half half linguistics half Arabic but in year three would be full Arabic and to spend time in you know wherever they go at the moment like Egypt or Palestine if we still go there um so so that's a full year of Arabic and then you come back and still half half again that's that's very true that's very true yeah so it's it that that's another another that's another way of showing that you know uh the language will get more than its fair share when you uh when you combine it with with linguistics so you yeah you won't be shortchanged um but yes you know I mean you know I unfortunately unlike unlike uh those of you listening to to this when I was in your position I'd never heard of linguistics I didn't know it existed if someone had told me it existed I probably would have done linguistics but instead I decided to do uh Arabic um single subject Arabic uh and I made the decision to um once I got to size and did discover linguistics I could have switched to linguistics and Arabic I made the decision to stick to Arabic and I did linguistics for my masters which uh is is of course also an option but you know it's really it's really up to you um uh you will you will definitely learn a lot of a lot of the language whether you do it as a single subject or you combine it with linguistics and just to repeat you know if you combine the language with linguistics I think you can be confident that you will get uh a different and I would argue improved uh perspective on the the structure the grammar of the language you're learning um now for the next question I've had a message from Elizabeth saying we do have to wrap up we have to finish so if you can answer that question in one minute that'd be really helpful I can if you're a native speaker of Arabic interested in translation between Arabic Japanese you should do linguistics and Japanese and in linguistics you should choose the translation pathway thank you very succinct thank you okay yes great okay well thank you very much everybody for attending I really hope that we'll see some of you in the future at SOS if you have any other questions you're really welcome to get in touch with us um we know we're very happy to answer questions from from prospective students okay one new message um okay thank you thank you very much everybody um thank you for all all our colleagues as well for taking part and I hope to see some of you soon okay bye bye