Public Outreach in Linguistics: Engaging Broader Audiences

Linguistics is traditionally a university subject. We describe here comprehensive efforts that the University of Arizona's Linguistics Department makes to engage with additional audiences: K-12 and community college students, lifelong learners, and festival-goers. Our coordination of these efforts is relatively recent, and this article emphasizes what we are learning in areas like adjustment to different audiences and efficient use of resources. While many individual linguists and some departments are engaged in outreach activities such as those described here, our work is unusual in its breadth, in terms of both external contacts and department-internal participants.