Conlangery #138: Jessie Sams and Conlangs in the Classroom

Jessie Sams comes on the show to talk to us about how she uses conlanging in the classroom. We discuss how these courses can be designed, what fields of linguistics they address well, and the results she saw from the course. Jessie also requested the following message be added to the notes:

I would also like to thank David J. Peterson, who has visited with my conlang students the last three times I’ve offered the course. His visits have been incredibly beneficial for both my students and me. Students don’t often have the chance to speak with the author of their textbook, so it’s an amazing experience.

Top of show Greeting: Nál [nɑːl] by Carl Avlund

Links and Resources:

• Jessie’s course syllabus
• Linguistics Olympiad sample problems
• Merrifield, W. R. (1987). Laboratory manual for morphology and syntax. Intl Academic Bookstore. (Google Books)
• Condis, M. (2016). Building Languages, Building Worlds: An Interview with Jessica Sams. Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, 4(1), 150–161.
• Sanders, N. (2016). Constructed languages in the classroom. Language, 92(3), e192–e204. https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2016.0055
• Pearson, M. (2017). Using Language Invention to Teach Typology and Cross-Linguistic Universals. Fiat Lingua, (April), 0–11.