My experience at the NZ Lingusitics Conference

This was my first time going to a linguistics conference and I had loads of fun. Being the only high school student among university students and professors was certainly intimidating, but everyone was kind and I managed to learn a lot about both subject and people’s day- to -day lives.

The conference consisted of multiple talks throughout the whole day on a wide variety of topics, and I found every single one of them interesting. I was amazed by the range of topics covered, from serious ,large -scale PhD theses to fun applications ,such as a tool that provides feedback on how accurately you pronounces Japanese vowels and how to improve your enunciating .

One talk I especially enjoyed was about PhoNZErdle, a variation of the game Wordle, where instead of guessing letters, player guess a five-phoneme word using New Zealand English phonemes transcribed in the IPA. This certainly adds a new layer complexity to a game that was starting to feel stale, and in the process I got to enhance my phonological skills.

The Conference even has its own dinner: we all went to the city centre to socialize and have fun. I was lucky enough to be seated next to some professors, and we talked about linguistics and their lives in academia. My main takeaway was that linguistics can be found everywhere and connected to almost every subject——there were so many engineers in the conference which I hadn’t expected.