The Journal of the University of Sydney Linguistics Society

By Theodore Tsolakis, Oscar Xiao and Anna Zhou

The Sydney University Linguistics Society (LingSoc) is a society consisting mostly of undergraduate students at the University of Sydney who study Linguistics or have an interest in it.

In 2021, the LingSoc executives had the idea to create a journal to showcase high-quality essays written by undergraduate students for Linguistics units they were completing. We realised that the hours of work that go into writing a high-quality essay normally result in only the author and the markers reading it, and we believed that the content contained within essays would also interest other students. We also believed that a journal would be an ideal place for students to look in order to view models of high-quality Linguistics essays so that they would be more able to write high-quality essays themselves.

In January 2022, we published the first issue of the Journal of the University of Sydney Linguistics Society. It contains seven essays that students wrote for classes they took in Semester 1, 2021. The teaching staff of each unit nominated several essays for inclusion in the journal, from which student editors selected the best essays and worked with the authors to expand and revise them for publication. We are also grateful to Professor Nick Enfield from the Department of Linguistics at the University of Sydney who also contributed an article.

The editorial team of the first issue was passionate about publishing students’ work because we believe that the study of Linguistics is important for understanding our history, our culture and our minds, because language unites all of these things which make us human.

The first issue of our journal has been very positively received, and we are eager to publish future issues.

You can read the inaugural issue of the journal here.