‫ ما أخبارك؟‬,‫ كيف حالك؟‬我很好。My fascination with languages began when I took a class in

German five years ago; the striking similarities that exist between the English and the German
languages, especially in terms of their grammatical structure, diction and word intonations,
simply amazed me and I sought to probe deeper into the origins and development of languages
from then on.
At first, I gave little thought to the question of why people communicate in distinct–or
identical–ways: I assumed that the answer lies wholly in geography. Before the availability of
high-speed transportation tools like steamboats and airplanes, neighboring groups of people
would naturally interact more with each other than with people who lived in faraway places.
Thus adjacent countries (e.g. Spain and Portugal, Japan and China, and the North African
nations) now share commonalities in their languages, cultures and even ways of thinking.
However, when I took a close look at the myriad of languages spoken in India, I realized that
geographical distance could not fully explain how the variations and similarities in our languages
came about. While all the Western European countries use the Roman alphabet in writing and
speak either the Romance or Germanic languages, the inhabitants of India alone have multiple
writing systems and speak more than a dozen entirely different languages. Why has geographical
proximity not shrunk the differences among the Indian languages like it did for the languages of
Western Europe? What other forces have been shaping our languages throughout history? To
avoid specializing in any particular discipline and to discover what other academic interests I
have, I have decided not to declare a major yet. Nevertheless, I plan to major in linguistics to
understand how we came to talk and write the way we do today.
Two years ago, I watched a documentary on duck dialects and found out that I had taken
an anthropocentric approach to linguistics. Thereafter I resolved to find out how animal
linguistics work. Unlike humans who can convey messages through speech or symbols (e.g.
emoticons), animals rely on nonverbal forms of communication to interact with one another; I
want to know how animals get their messages across as much as I want to understand how
human languages have evolved over time. Since I watched the documentary on duck dialects, I
have had conceived of a project to investigate the dialects of geese. To carry out this project, I
will first create for myself a program of study that integrates the fields of animal bioacoustics
and linguistics. Then I will borrow audio equipment from the Cornell Linguistics Department to
record the sounds of geese in separate regions and analyze my recordings in Cornell’s linguistics
labs. Finally, I will consult Cornell’s experienced professors on how I can optimize my results
and seek their help whenever I encounter difficulties in my project.