The UnderLings are the undergraduate linguistics club here at Ohio State, which organizes events and outreach within the department and with the larger Columbus community. In recent years, the Underlings have focused a lot of energy around fostering a welcoming environment and a space for students interested in linguistics to interact with each other. Here are a few highlights of their activities:
- Student Kenna Miller has helped to set up an UnderLings discord server where students share ideas about coursework, exchange linguistics memes, and organize events such as online game nights and an upcoming “Linguistics Hot Takes” presentation night organized by Rebekah Stanhope.
- Since September 2018, the UnderLings (represented by Victora Paxton) have been assisting Dr. Brian Joseph in reaching out to local high schools to encourage the inclusion of linguistics clubs and curriculum. This past semester, they worked with Metro High School to create both a linguistics club (planned and led by UnderLings members) as well as a semester-long linguistics course taught by graduate student Carly Dickerson.
- In addition to meetings, they have hosted a number of social activities. These have included game nights, and a screening and discussion about the movie Pontypool led by Dr. Björn Köhnlein. They have also sent out a dozen or so installments of the UnderLings Newsletter (written by Katriese DeLeon) featuring interesting linguistics-related articles/videos/memes, upcoming events, and UnderLings members of the week.
- The UnderLings also regularly sponsor visitors to campus. They were hard at work planning for an event featuring Dr. Joseph Windsor (University of Calgary, President of the Language Creation Society), which was unfortunately cancelled due to travel restrictions relating to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Until in-person activities can resume, UnderLings have been focusing on their community-building efforts remotely, using the Discord server to communicate and moving many meetings over to Zoom.
Any undergraduate who is interested in languages and linguistics is welcome to join the club- just contact undergraduate coordinator Dr. Julie McGory.
