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I'd love to launch a Linguistics Museum. One reason is that I've never been to one and believe that there is a real need and demand for such a museum. Another is that this is the field that I've studied. My goal would be to bring more attention to the scientific study of language and increase people's interest in this fascinating and constantly changing field.

My Linguistics Museum would be very interactive. For example, I'd have a machine where people could hear a language and then guess which one it was. I'd also have a computer where people could learn about phonetic transcription, transcribe their names phonetically, see the tongue position for various sounds and listen to exotic ones, an exhibit on different writing systems, a section on endangered languages, an explanation of animal languages, one on language change and another on the classification of the world's different languages.

My museum would give exposure to languages which are not so well known. Of course languages such as German, French, Chinese and Japanese would be prominently featured, but visitors would also learn about less widely-spoken languages such as Hawaiian, Zulu and Tagalog. It would also remind visitors of the many endangered languages in the world today. Many are disappearing at an alarmingly fast rate, so my museum would aim to convince people that every language is a treasure and that analyzing and recording languages is truly worthwhile.

Machines that showed visitors the tongue position used to produce different sounds would be very popular. I'd also have machines to record the frequency of a person's voice, a spectrogram to show a person's voiceprint, and other interesting information such as the speed and loudness of an utterance. Visitors would have a great time comparing one another.

The chance to listen to exotic sounds and also imitate them would be another big hit. Visitors would love to try to reproduce the click sounds of Zulu, the tones of Thai and the consonant clusters of Polish. They'd also be able to have a machine score their imitation of a particular sound.

Animal language would be a popular section of my museum. It would explain to what extent animals use language and how they use it. For example, visitors would learn that the honeybee has a special dance that it uses to indicate the location of a food source. This can hardly be considered the same as human language, but it's a form of communication that serves a specific purpose. Visitors would also be able to

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