Our
Experience
Learn about the vision that founds our LING3003 Field Trip courses and what these field trips are about.
The Linguistics Field Trip course introduces students to the art and science of collecting and analysing real-life language data. Every year, HKU linguistics students travel to a country unknown to them and immerse themselves into its people, language and culture. Past trips have been to Indonesia, Japan, Thailand, Nepal, China, Korea, Denmark, Greece, Ghana, Kenya, Mauritius, and Ethiopia. The field trip showcased on this website went to Malaysia, a country of extraordinary linguistic diversity and beauty.
It’s multi-dimensional: it has an academic component, it has a social component, it has a communicative component; it has a cultural exchange component.
It's just a very, very holistic experience.
The field trips are organized in collaboration with partner universities. HKU students and teachers mingle with their peers and work together in teams in their destination. They take classes together, work in joint study groups and fan out to look for and record speakers of the languages they are interested in. HKU students have worked on a large and diverse range of languages including Amharic, Tigrinya and Akan, Malay, Indonesian, Javanese and Sundanese, Cantonese, Teochew and Hakka, Nepalese, Nubri and Gyalsumdo, Korean and Japanese, Papia Kristang, Mauritian Creole, and Tamil.
Linguistics field trips are not all work and no play. Visits to cultural and historical sites give students an understanding and appreciation of the society of their host people. Excursions have gone to the spectacular rock-hewn churches of Lalibela in northern Ethiopia, the Hindu shrines of Batu Caves in Malaysia, the Museum of The Asian-African Conference in Bandung, Indonesia, and the Himalaya valleys and peaks surrounding Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal.
During Linguistic Field Trips, students fine-tune their social competence and intercultural awareness, acquire new technical and software skills, and boost their creativity in handling unfamiliar places and situations. Over the years, Linguistics Field Trips have evolved into best practices of international collaboration and knowledge exchange, academic and professional training at HKU.
DR. KOFI YAKPO - Course Instructor,
Associate Professor at the Department of Linguistics, HKU