THE LINGUISTS, the first documentary supported by the National Science Foundation, was selected to world premiere in the newly minted “Spectrum: Documentary Spotlight” category at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival. The trailer is at http://www.thelinguists.com. One of the linguists featured is our very own Gregory Anderson (UofC PhD 2000). Here’s a brief description provided by Ironbound Films:

“It is estimated that of 7,000 languages in the world, half will be gone by the end of this century.

THE LINGUISTS follows David Harrison and Gregory Anderson, scientists racing to document languages on the verge of extinction. In Siberia, India, and Bolivia, the linguists’ resolve is tested by the very forces silencing languages: institutionalized racism and violent economic unrest.

David and Greg’s journey takes them deep into the heart of the cultures, knowledge, and communities at risk when a language dies.”

CSLI has posted full PDFs of many of their books for free download. There are a lot of goodies here. Don’t miss this great opportunity!

After a long summer hiatus, our department news blog is back! As you might have noticed, the name of the news blog has changed. Due to popular demand, what was BLISS is now BLING (Blog in LINGuistics). Please be sure to update your bookmark to reflect the new URL of the site.

Mitcho Erlewine, one of our graduating seniors, has been awarded a Fulbright fellowship to teach English in Taiwan. Congratulations!

An NSF-funded project in the Computer Science department at the University of Chicago is looking for a full-time undergraduate summer intern for the Summer of 2007. The project explores computational approaches to speech recognition and understanding, specifically recognition of tone and intonation. The summer position would continue development of a tool to support computer-assisted learning of tone and intonation. Building on existing software, the plan is to build an interface to provide feedback to language learners by identifying errors in their own speech both visually and auditorily as well as employing synthesis to demonstrate the correct pronunciation. Interested candidate should contact Gina Levow at levow “AT” cs.uchicago.edu for more detail.