RSO - Linguistics Club

What makes us human? Chimps, with whom we share ~96% of our DNA, have a numerical memory faculty vastly superior to that of humans. They are stronger, faster, more agile, more ferocious than we could ever expect to be — the same holds true for gorillas and orangutans. In fact, our abilities pale in comparison to the rest of the Great Apes, almost as if we were an afterthought of evolution that didn't quite work out.

Yet we thrive. Why? Our physical abilities are clearly inferior to those of apes. At least some of our cognitive abilities are known to be inferior to those of apes. But at some level of abstraction, humans emerge as the pinnacle of social beings.

Is it our ability to communicate? Chimps laugh, dogs bare their teeth and wag their tails and bark and whine and cry and play, bees dance. As much as we'd like to think that they are what define a human, these traits are not uniquely human.

Among all social behaviors, there is only one that sticks out as uniquely human: language. Chimps raised alongside human babies don't acquire human language, but the human babies do. Dogs and cats and parrots can all talk, but they cannot speak.

Language is the human universal. Linguistics is the study of that universal.

The purpose of Linguistics Club is two-fold: we seek to supplement the linguistics major with extracurricular opportunities and also more generally to promote and enhance the study of language within the Five Colleges community. We stress that our over-arching goal is to provide an extracurricular outlet for all undergraduates interested in language-related topics, not just linguistics majors. Language study spans numerous fields and majors; we aim to bring students within these various related fields together through activities with broad appeal, such as movies, games, and entertaining talks. Above all else, our goal is the promotion of language study for an academically diverse audience in an informal and fun atmosphere.