Students from across campus joined together to share their passion for their studies through short rants on anything and everything linguistics.
Everyone loves a good rant. Whether you’re debating your favorite contestant on The Bachelor or if pineapple belongs on pizza, it’s freeing to share the opinions you’re most passionate about. A rant about linguistics proves no different. On March 6, 2025, the Linguistics Student Society (LSS) gathered the most enthusiastic linguistic scholars on campus to present rants on niche linguistics principles they’re passionate about. Society members spent the night expanding their knowledge of linguistics while meeting peers with similar interests.
Rating of the Rants
The participants ranted on a variety of topics, some of which hit close to home. Runner-up Amber Christiansen (Music Education, Linguistics ’28) passionately described the connections she sees between music and linguistics. “Language is a tool that everyone uses all the time to communicate things, and music’s [used] more as an art to communicate things,” she explained. “But, arguably, they’re not that different.” Since starting her studies in linguistics, Christiansen has seen many comparisons between the workings of both music and linguistics, including parallels in expression, dynamics, and even acoustics. She said, “Linguistics is awesome, and I’m really glad that I heard about it because it’s helping me understand music in ways that a lot of musicians don’t.”
The first-place rant, given by Cody Daniels (Computer Science, Linguistics ’25), offered a lighthearted argument in favor of something known as the Deseret Alphabet. This alphabet was once widely used in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as a phonetic alternative to the standard English alphabet, but it is no longer in use today. “If we had the Deseret Alphabet, we could write literature and [Utah] dialects more easily and be able to add dimension to characters,” Daniels argued. “You may be thinking, ‘Cody, we have the International Phonetic Alphabet [IPA].’ But, the IPA is a little bit gross. Maybe that’s controversial, but this is a rant.”
Making a Language Community
Other rants touched on slang—especially words that perfectly describe an individual or archetype, such as Karen or Chad—and on the common errors made when translating. These rants encouraged participants to use their understanding of linguistics in a creative way, sharing their controversial takes on a variety of topics in their field. Additionally, they helped to gather a community of dedicated linguists together to share their enthusiasm for their studies. The event emphasized a fact LSS presidency member Meckenzie Godfrey (Linguistics, Spanish ’26) finds significant: “Linguistics is so much more than learning languages. . . . It’s this descriptive beauty of the English language and other languages that we’re learning about.”
Learn more about LSS and their upcoming events here.