A Conversation with Russell Schuh, Department of Linguistics, UCLA

Back

"Nothing is more fun than doing my job," says Russell Schuh. A professor at UCLA since 1975, Schuh gets paid for doing his hobbies: teaching linguistics and doing descriptive, comparative, and historical work on African languages. His specialty is the West Branch of the Chadic family of languages from northern Nigeria, including Hausa, the largest natively-spoken language in sub-Saharan Africa. After over 30 years of teaching classes and traveling back and forth between Africa and Los Angeles for his research, Schuh has no intention of giving up his hobby. Schuh first developed an interest in African languages through his work in the Peace Corps. After receiving his BA in French from the University of Oregon, finishing his MA from Northwestern in the same field, and attending UC Berkeley to do graduate work in Linguistics, Schuh spent two years working to increase adult literacy in the Niger Republic. There, he applied his work in linguistics to both the Hausa and Tamazhaq languages. In the mid-1970s, Schuh returned to Nigeria for two years to conduct research with the Center for Nigerian Languages. Schuh uses multimedia demonstrations of his own research data to teach his students. In his office, a small fleet of laptops rests among an eclectic array of books and woven baskets. "Language is about people talking...it grabs your attention so much more to see somebody actually saying things than to see it written down on a piece of paper in black and white," he says. In 1996, he helped create footage of semi-controlled every day exchanges in Nigeria that is used to teach beginning-level Hausa. In his linguistics classes, he uses video clips of speakers of a variety of languages, for example, speakers of related languages counting 1-10 to show how languages can be similar and different at the same time and speakers illustrating how languages differ in the ways they put sentences together. Produced for the New Language Classroom website at www.international.ucla.edu/languages/lab

Category: Education
Uploaded: September 23rd, 2008 @ 10:58 pm
Author: UCLA

Length: 05:09
Rating:
Views:

Tags: ucla uclachannel hausa languages africa linguistics center for world

Video Thumbnails:

Video Embedding Code:

* Embed this video on your website, social bookmark, myspace, or blog.

Lyrics