Hey there! I'm Daniel, a lover of languages, a carer for the people, and a seeker of the Truth.

At first, linguistics may seem like an obscure and useless subject. I admit—it is niche, super theoretical, and unlike pre-med and pre-law majors which directly cure us of the horrors of death and taxes, there doesn't seem to be any immediate, apparent applications. 

What linguistics does have to offer is twofold: (a) an appreciation of culture and (b) an expansion of all language-related technology. It is an interdisciplinary subject—psychology, neuroscience, and the rest of the cognitive sciences necessitate it. It's a combination of both STEM and the humanities. It is also hands-on.

Besides my genuine love and affinity for language learning, the drive behind my undying interest in linguistics is a desire to foster empathy between cultures. That can be done through in-person linguistics fieldwork, where we not only can preserve the myriads of rare, endangered languages out there, but maybe strike up a conversation or two with the locals. And moreover, as we trek onwards to the future, I want to expand access to language technology—or use language to superpower technology like LLMs, AI, speech synthesis, etc. After all, Rico Sennrich, PhD in computational linguistics, asserts that expanding fields like natural language processing and neural machine translation rely on the backbone of linguistics theory.

Planned in the summer of my sophomore year and founded in my junior year, Leland Linguistics Club runs biweekly meetings covering any and all linguistics-related topics, from phonology to syntax to even Language Reviews! (Arabic, in particular, is a cool one.)

With over 30 members, we've invited guest speakers, coached NACLO sign-ups, and even started working on our very own conlang! Every meeting is bound to be a lot of fun.

Check out our YouTube channel with 10+ lecture videos!
https://www.youtube.com/@lhs_linguistics

 Presentation on Syntax Basics, 12 February 2025

 Arabic Language Review, 20 November 2024