Midterm delivery

The main topic of our research is “Linguistic relativity”: how languages shape our perceptions and thoughts.

After doing our research into languages, we decided that we want to focus on the untranslatable words that tell us so much about the world around us and gives us new perspectives and ways to express ourselves. These words also tell us a lot about the culture and how people live their lives in a specific country.

We have decided to hand out a survey to involve people and ask them about these untranslatable words in their own languages, what it says about their culture and how they would visualize these words. We will also use our own personal experiences as a multicultural group of students and describe our own words into this list.

Further on, we will create a game that people can play together and talk about these words and new cultures. We still need to decide and sketch what this card game will look like but our main inspiration for now is "we're not really strangers".

For now, we haven’t decided how to divide the project yet between us since it’s still unclear what we will do for the map. However, we have discussed our different skills and talked about the possibilities. Until now, we met up very regularly to make all decisions together but have planned to determine different research directions for each for the coming week. We are still figuring the details out but have drafted options for each person linked to their interests and skills.

Peer feedback (thoughts)

During our Peer Feedback session, we asked the other students how they felt about language and how speaking different languages affects their behavior and perception of things. We also asked if they had examples in mind of spaces or countries that are inhabited by multiple languages. We got a few interesting answers about how some feel when speaking English compared to dutch or just speaking a foreign language in general. Keo mentioned South Afrika which encouraged us to make it our case study and even offered to share some research she previously made and answer questions since she comes from South Afrika. An interesting question that was asked was if or how we were going to involve our personal opinions in this map which led to us having a discussion about it. We first want to see the results of our case study before making up our minds and will see what opinions and narratives form themselves from that.