During its annual Fund Drive, the Linguist List features undergraduate and early-career graduate students who have gone above and beyond the classroom to participate in the wider field of linguistics. Selected nominees exemplify a commitment to not only academic performance, but also to the field of linguistics and principles of scientific inquiry.

This year's nomination for Rising Star is none other than Sid Bhushan, an undergraduate student in his senior year here at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Sid was nominated by his mentors, Joshua Dees and Dr. Aida Talić. According to Josh: 

"It is with great joy that I nominate Sid Bhushan for the ‘Rising Stars’ series. I instantly knew Sid was a star when he took morphology with me. Sid demonstrated a deep interest in not only morphosyntax, but the entire field of linguistics. He is incredibly adept in the areas of language acquisition, as he serves as an RA on two separate second language acquisition projects (with Dr. Silvina Montrul and PhD-candidate Aylin Coşkun Kunduz); morphosyntax, as he has presented work on Kannada gender and number morphology at conferences (including the Arizona Linguistics Circle and the Western Conference on Linguistics) and published a proceedings paper on the topic (through the Western Conference on Linguistics); and computational linguistics.

In addition to showing great promise in many areas of linguistic research, Sid is a passionate leader within our field. He actively runs the Department of Linguistics at the University of Illinois’ undergraduate organization (League of Linguists); in which he serves as the student-faculty liaison, organizes talks from graduate students and faculty for his peers, runs study sessions where he and his peers meet and actively help each other with their homework and projects, and plans parties and other fun linguistics-oriented gatherings. He is also an active participant in the Linguistics Department’s Syntax and Semantics reading group, where he has presented his own work and actively engages in others’ work. He regularly attends the department’s Linguistics Seminar Series and is never shy to discuss ideas with guest presenters from around the world.

Outside of being a wonderful ‘early’ researcher and leader in our field, Sid is a humble and kind human. Being his mentor and teacher for the last two years has been an absolute joy. He more than deserves to be included in the Linguist List’s 'Rising Stars' series.

Sid's accomplishments are especially impressive considering he is a senior undergraduate student finishing his degree in Computer Science and Linguistics a year early (3 years). He will be pursuing a PhD in Linguistics starting Fall 2024."

Sid reflects:

"Linguistics is the study of language, which is something that seems to be quintessentially human. Everyone uses language almost constantly and it’s something that we are exposed to every day of our lives. Yet, despite the universality of language, it’s also incredibly diverse: there are thousands of languages in existence across hundreds of different families and each one contains its own unique elements to study. Not only are languages diverse with respect to each other, language also encapsulates so many different aspects of humanity, from the cognitive processes in our brains to the ways in which we use language as part of our intricate network of social interactions.

Personally, one of the key reasons that I find linguistics interesting to study is that I can relate it with my own experiences with language. For example, I’m particularly interested in studying multilingualism, with a specific focus on social and cognitive processes behind unbalanced multilinguals. This is because of my personal background being a multilingual heritage speaker and wanting to investigate how the linguistic structures I use everyday work. I am sure that many other linguists share the same motivations, although in different subfields. One of the most amazing things about linguistics is that there is something in there for everyone, because language is everywhere, and everyone’s personal linguistic experiences are so different. In my opinion, this fact is one of things that truly sustains linguistics as such a ubiquitous and interdisciplinary field of study.

As I reach the end of the first step in my linguistics journey, I am grateful to take this opportunity to reflect on what the field means to me and so many others. I will be entering a PhD program later this year to continue learning and working on my research and I look forward to the opportunity to contribute to expanding our ever-growing base of knowledge about this wonderful thing that we call language."

The Linguist list is a unique service run by students of linguistics and moderated by faculty of the discipline. It connects, facilitates and advances professional activities in Linguistics.

You can read the article from the Linguist List here. You can also check out our Spotlight article on Sid here.