for size

(In the 2012 spirit of posting shorter posts, more often…)

—–

Last weekend I went shopping in Edinburgh’s New Town for a new pair of boots. Usually shoe shopping is fun, but this time I was getting frustrated. It was my third attempt to find something decent, and I’d already bought and returned a pair. The trouble is that I’m a UK size 5.5 and boot sizes seem to not be available in half-sizes, so everything I’d tried on was either too big (6) or too small (5). Anyway, when I finally found a pair that did fit (European size 38, fwiw), I was happy to reply in the affirmative when the salesperson asked me:

“How do those fit for size?”

Which was a perfectly intelligible question, and to which I answered:

“Great, I’ll take them.”

Then a split second later, I thought, “Hey, that’s question’s not actually grammatical to me!” And then in the next second I thought, “But the sentence ‘Try this on for size’ is grammatical to me…” And then, following that, I thought “but that sentence actually has no literal meaning to me.”

The point being that, until that moment, it had never occurred to me that the original meaning of ‘Try this one for size’ would ever actually involve someone trying on something for, well, size! I assume other Americans have this intuition as well?

 

2011 Retrospective

I’m inspired by Rachel Cotterill’s recent post to take this moment to reflect on the past twelve months. I told Jefferson that I’d try to balance this post between work-related events and personal ones, and he suggested I just do both. So if this post gets too long for your tastes, blame him.

In January I started teaching classes at my (now not-so) new job (because the department had graciously given me the Sept-Dec semester to settle in with only advising duties and reading groups to worry about). My first class at the University of Edinburgh was an MSc seminar introducing the topic of linguistic variation and indexical meaning. January was also the month when Jefferson and I started looking for a flat to buy in Edinburgh (something that still hasn’t happened, because it turns out that it’s not easy for recently-arrived Americans to get a mortgage in Britain).

In February, teaching got more intense, with the addition of lectures in 1st-year undergraduate Linguistics, 1st year undergraduate English Language (which were two separate courses that are now combined into one), and the beginning of an intense 6-week course in 2nd-year Linguistics (“Empirical Methods”). February 3 was the Asian Lunar New Year, which was a week or so after Burns’ Night, and I celebrated both with my first attempt at the blended event “Gung Haggis Fat Choy” by making homemade jiaozi stuffed with haggis. My plan in 2012 is to do it again but to make it a party!

Handmade haggis-filled jiaozi for Gung Haggis Fat Choy (January 2011)

In March I got a chance to return to Oxford for a weekend to present at and help run the “Sound Day” workshop, an interdisciplinary event that I co-organized with two other Oxford post-docs. I also had a rather high number of excellent meals with friends and colleagues that month!

In April I got the closest I’ve been so far to Wales — Chester, England — without actually going into Wales. I didn’t cross the border because I was too busy the whole time attending the fabulous VaLP conference that Phil Tipton organized and hosted at Chester. I then spent the rest of April recovering from the busy semester, especially by rediscovering the joy of reading novels (by starting with the Edinburgh-based 44 Scotland Street series).

In May I visited the University of Essex for the first time and then hosted a number of linguist-friends who were visiting Edinburgh. I also joined the Edinburgh Orchestral Ensemble, although, due to the very small number of participants (e.g., one week the conductor had to stop conducting and play the violin because there were no violins!), I dropped out that same month.

In June I examined a PhD viva for the first time (as the internal examiner), which was hard work but a great experience (congratulations, Dr. Corinne Maxwell-Reid!). I then flew to Boston for the ISLE conference; it was an excellent conference and I got to catch up with several old friends from UofA and Stanford who now live in Boston.

Participants in the ISLE 2011 conference workshop, "Mergers in English: Perspectives from phonology, sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics" (http://www.bu.edu/isle/isle-2011-conference-program/)

In July I had the fantastic experience of teaching at the Summer School of Sociolinguistics in Glasgow. And then, after years of waiting, I finally got to see my friends Sonny Singh and John Altieri perform live with their band, Red Baraat. They performed four times in one weekend in London and I saw three of the shows.

Red Baraat at the Barbican in London (July, 2011)

In August I attended my first ICPhS conference, which was in Hong Kong. (My slides are posted here.) It’d been 10 years since I’d been to Asia and I particularly love Hong Kong so it was another big 2011 highlight. Then Scotland won the bid for the next ICPhS meeting (in 2015), which was very exciting (and a bit nerve-wracking as well)! August was an intensely busy month personally as well, in part because we moved to a new flat (by bus, which Jefferson is very proud of), but mostly because of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Jefferson and I saw maybe two dozen shows or so, most of them not too awful (and some of them rather good!). Seeing Kristen Schaal perform, and both seeing and meeting Hari Kondabolu, were particularly cool moments (although I’m still jealous of Jefferson, who got to see and meet David Sedaris while I was away in Hong Kong).

Hong Kong at sunset, view from the convention centre (August 2011)

In September the semester started up again, with my first stab at the Honours Sociolinguistics research seminar and the (logistically complicated and, at first, very stressful) MSc Introduction to Sociolinguistics lecture. I also tried to join a Zumba class, which didn’t last more than two weeks…

Then after having taken two years away from my favorite conference (missing 2009 and 2010), in October I attended NWAV’s 40th anniversary and had a splendid time! Jefferson and I also started attending Salsa dance classes in October, which (unlike Zumba) we hope to get back to in 2012.

The NWAV40 "All-Star Panel" at Georgetown University (October 2011)

November was a big blur of teaching, advising, and giving talks (first in York and then in Freiburg at the “Indexing Authenticity” workshop). There’s not much personal to recount from November; my only day off was the day we went on strike, which I spent picketing and marching, so which didn’t really feel like a day off.

The UCU participating in the national strike for pensions on 30 November 2011 (in Edinburgh)

And finally we come to December, when classes quietly wound down and marking quickly stacked up. Jefferson and I stayed here in Scotland for the holidays instead of flying back to the States, and we celebrated our 5-year wedding anniversary by taking the “best rail journey in the world.” It was indeed beautiful, but it rained the whole time and our B&B in Mallaig lost electricity due to 90mph winds. I suppose that’s what happens when you plan a winter vacation in Scotland!

The Glenfinnan viaduct, famous for its use in the Harry Potter movies (December 2011)

2011 was a fantastic year but rather exhausting, in moments! My hope is that 2012 will be a little more laid back. And that I’ll get back to blogging more, too.

naming a corpus

I’m creating a corpus for public distribution, but I’m stuck on a highly crucial point in the project: the corpus needs a name!

Fog hanging over Golden Gate Park in western San Francisco

Some corpora have better names than others. There are corpora where the name is simply the initials: the British National Corpus is just the BNC, pronounced (thankfully!) just as “bee en see.” But some corpora have really nice names, like COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English), ICE (International Corpus of English), VOICE (Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English), and COLT (the Bergen Corpus of London Teenage Language… which you might think would be BCLT, but COLT is sooo much better). The most clever corpus names, I think, are CHILDES (Child Language Data Exchange System; actually much more than a single corpus, but close enough) and SCOTS (Scottish Corpus of Texts and Speech), which both describe the thing they stand for (there must be a term for that kind of acronym…). There are also corpus names that are not acronyms, and which only describe what they are: Switchboard is a corpus of collected telephone calls, CallFriend is a corpus of calls specifically between friends, and the Buckeye Corpus is the speech of Buckeyes (speakers in Columbus, Ohio)!

The Sunset District, San Francisco, California

My corpus, based on my PhD research, consists of sociolinguistic interviews (in the form of anonymized sound files, transcripts, and phonetic alignments) among San Franciscans who grew up in the western neighborhood known as the Sunset District. The interviews (and reading passages and wordlists) are all in English, which thus gives me the following letters to play with for an acronym for my corpus: S(an), F(rancisco), S(unset), D(istrict), E(nglish), I(nterviews), and C(orpus). But coming up with a cute acronym has proven difficult. The most obvious one is the Corpus of San Francisco English: COSFE. But “COSFE” sounds horrible! What does that last vowel even sound like, exactly? Adding “Interviews” to the end makes it “COSFEI,” which disambiguates the vowel sound, but it still doesn’t sound very nice at all. I tried playing around “SD,” for Sunset Distict, rather than “SF,” but that didn’t get me any further. So, should I just continue to call it the boring thing I’ve affectionately been calling it from the beginning: the SanFran Corpus? Or how about the Sunset Corpus (which unfortunately makes it seem like it’s the corpus to end all corpora)?

I’ve already given this waaay too much thought, so I leave it to you….

Typical Sunset District homes, in the style of Henry Doelger

Sexy Leprechaun Accents

I’ve been watching more TV than usual. We recently moved and it’s taking forever for internet access to get set up in our new place, so, in the meantime, we watch TV. (Books, schmooks.) I completely justify doing this, academically, because watching TV is a great way to learn about the ambient culture. I’ll never forget the first day of John Rickford’s field methods course when he asked us all who the local sports teams were and none of us had any idea (and thus we were not at all ready for fieldwork). Anyway, while I do still watch a fair number of American shows, I’ve become a fan of several of the British ones as well. Particularly the game shows. Most game shows, I’d wager (pun intended), tell you a ton about a culture. At a macro level (which is true for any show), you can first see what people find entertaining and valuable. For example, there are far more trivia-based game shows in the UK than in the US. But it’s the micro level of game shows that I love, when you see contestants talking off the cuff. Of course this is also true for reality shows, but with game shows, particularly the trivia-based ones, you also get immediate evidence for what kind of knowledge people value and cultivate. And even more interesting is the immediate data you get about what attitudinal and ideological associations are most salient.

My favo(u)rite example of this was one of the first times I watched All Star Family Fortunes, which, for you Americans, is a show that’s exactly like Family Feud except that each family is the family of a British celebrity (and all the winnings go to charity, which rocks). The concept of the show is pretty simple: they “surveyed 100 people” on a particular question and then the contestants must guess the top few answers given by those 100 people. One time I was watching a round where the question was “What do you associate with builders?” First off, builders are what Americans call construction workers. If it’d been me, I would’ve said that I associate them with, oh I dunno, building materials. If I had to be specific, I’d say cement, or wood, or some other material or tool. What do they say in Britain? Well one of the top answers on that particular round was: “tea.” As in builder’s tea (or even the brand, Builders Tea). Because, you know, builders take a lot of tea breaks, and they drink strong, cheap tea. Duh.

Now that I’ve totally confirmed every British stereotype held by every American reading this, let me get to my point.

Last night I was watching a particularly trashy game show. It’s not even worthy of being called a “game show” — it’s just a dating show with many contestants and flashing lights and an obnoxious host and a live audience. The show is called “Take Me Out” and it’s filmed in Manchester, in Northern England. The premise is that single bachelors are strutted out onto the stage one at a time and a panel of a couple dozen single women decide whether or not they’d date him, and then he chooses from among the remaining subset of women who would, and then they go on a date. As I say, it’s trashy. Anyway, something interesting happened last night, related to language attitudes in Britain. It left me mystified, and so now I turn to you.

There were two bachelors in the second half of the show. The first one was a guy from Edinburgh, the second a guy from Dublin. The first guy had no one interested in him at all and left without a date. The second guy garnered tons of interest and had his pick of women. Here’s what gets me: both men gave an introduction when they came out onto the stage, something short along the lines of “I’m John, and I’m from X.” After the Edinburgh guy spoke, several of the women backed out. The host asked one of them why, and she said to the contestant “I’m sorry, I’m sure you’re nice and all, but I just can’t understand what you’re saying.” However, after the Dublin guy spoke, most of the women did not back out, and two of the women specifically swooned over his accent. One woman remarked that she’d gone to Ireland in hopes of finding herself a leprechaun, and was glad for the second chance (“leprechaun” was said very nudge nudge, wink wink). The woman who actually got the date with the Dubliner stated that her “biggest turn-on is a man with a strong accent.”

But not an Edinburgh one, apparently.

Let’s clarify a few things: as far as Scottish accents are concerned, the Edinburgh accent is not considered particularly strong. What’s more, most of the women on this show seem to be from Northern England, where accents are generally more marked than Southern England (where ‘near-RP’ and such things reside). In fact, the woman who said she “couldn’t understand” the Edinburgh man was (if I remember correctly) from Newcastle upon Tyne, which is relatively close to the Scottish border (and famous for its own very marked accent, Geordie). Even though sociolinguistic research has explored the ways in which the Scottish-English border is indeed an important psychological and ideological divide, Ireland is across a body of water and is not even part of the UK! So the idea that it would have any more comprehensible or intelligible of an accent seems like a real stretch.

So what’s going on here? Is a Dublin accent considered more sexy than an Edinburgh accent? In Coupland and Bishop’s 2007 analysis of “5010 U.K. informants’ reactions to 34 different accents of English,” Edinburgh scored an average of 4.49 (on a 5-point scale) on Social Attractiveness measures, and Southern Irish scored 4.68. These are very similar values, when compared to the other 32 accents, though with Southern Irish slightly higher than Edinburgh it is leaning in the direction expected. In terms of Prestige, Edinburgh scored 4.04, Southern Irish 3.63, which is not particularly helpful here. If we look at the results for Social Attractiveness by gender, women rate both accents higher than men do (which is true for most of the accents), but not drastically differently between the two (Edinburgh = 4.59, Southern Irish = 4.83). For Prestige, there’s no gender difference for Edinburgh, while women rate Southern Irish as slightly more prestigious than men do (3.69 vs. men’s 3.58). In short, I think there’s something interesting about the value of these accents that was reflected in last night’s “Take Me Out” but which I don’t think has been fully captured in the language attitudes literature, yet.

Granted, the Dublin contestant was more conventionally attractive than the Edinburgh lad, so maybe all that incomprehensible-accent stuff was just an way to save face.

"Take Me Out" host, Paddy McGuinness

“Let’s Speak Twi!”

An announcement

In the midst of my busiest teaching semester ever, I’m going to pause between moments of powerpoint-slide creation to advertise the final result of a project that I’m very excited about! Last month, CSLI Publications released Let’s Speak Twi: A Proficiency Course in Akan Language and Culture, co-authored by me and fellow linguists Adams Bodomo and Charles Marfo. Let me tell you a little bit about the book!

Cover for "Let's Speak Twi"

About Twi

Twi is a Ghanaian language and the most widely-spoken variety of the Akan language group. It is the politically dominant indigenous language of Ghana, particularly found in the South (although the capital, Accra, is also associated with the minority language, Ga). When Americans and Brits go to Ghana and want to learn a native language, Twi is usually the one that they study. When I talk to people who have never heard of Twi before, I often tell them that it’s the native language of Kofi Annan (remember him?).

Kofi Annan (photo from Wikipedia)

Twi Names

The name Kofi is a very common Twi day name, given to males born on Friday. My husband’s sister, who is Ghanaian, has four children, all of them who happened to be born on Friday (!), and three of them boys. So they’re all technically named Kofi, though with variations on their name that distinguish between them (one of them goes by an English nickname, for example). I personally think Twi naming practices are really interesting… Wikipedia (and our book, of course!) gives a decent overview.

Pronunciation Tip

Here’s a hint for if you ever want to actually say the word ‘Twi’ outloud: the first sound in ‘Twi’ is a rounded affricate, so it sounds to an English speaker something like ‘chwee’. This is because the digraph ‘tw’ represents a single complex sound in Twi, not two (/t/ + /w/) as it would be in English. (As a parallel, think about how wrong it would sound if someone pronounced the th in ‘think’ as ‘tuh-hink’!)

IPA for the sound indicated by "tw" in Twi

Twi has two major dialects: Asante (or Ashanti) Twi, associated with the major city of Kumasi, and Akuapem Twi, associated with the city of Koforidua (where my husband’s family calls home). Twi is often referred to as Fante-Twi or Twi-Fante, because Fante (or Fanti or Mfantse, spoken in and around Cape Coast) is very similar to Twi; both Fante and Twi are Akan languages. But they’re different enough from one another that we decided to focus specifically on (Asante) Twi, in our book, and not on Fante. For example, here’s a website showing the differences between Twi and Fante day names.

Me & Twi

I’ve been interested in linguistic aspects of Twi for awhile, ever since meeting my now-husband, who is half-Ghanaian (and who understands Twi but doesn’t speak it so much), and his mother, to whom this book is dedicated. At the time when Jefferson and I met, I already had studied a little German, Spanish, Mandarin, and Cantonese, and as someone from Flagstaff, Arizona, I had also always been personally interested in the Navajo and Hopi languages. But Twi was so different from all of these, and as I studied it (first at Stanford University, then informally in Ghana, and then at SCALI), I grew to like it more and more.

Visiting Akaa Falls in Ghanas Eastern Region (August 2010)

I wrote my second of two PhD qualifying papers on a phonological issue in Twi dialect variation (with advisors Arto Anttila & Will Leben). I had considered going back to Ghana for sociolinguistic fieldwork for my dissertation. For various reasons, that never materialized, and so I’m very proud to have this book instead.

The making of “Let’s Speak Twi”

Adams Bodomo, the lead author on Let’s Speak Twi, is actually not a native speaker of Twi (he’s from Northern Ghana, and speaks a language called Dagaare). Clearly, I am not a native speaker of Twi! Our second author, Charles Marfo, is the native speaker here. The story of the book is that Adams and Charles together developed an earlier version for their students at Hong Kong University. Around the same time, I was studying Twi and was a little disappointed with the textbooks on offer. Then in 2006, Adams came to Stanford University, to collaborate with Arto Anttila. Adams showed me the earlier version and my first reaction to it was “This must get published!” So, Adams invited me to join the team and get it done.

The main challenge in getting it published was, sadly, an issue of fonts. Twi has two vowel symbols that are not part of the standard Roman script: ɛ & ɔ, which we needed in both uppercase and lowercase forms. What’s more, we wanted to represent every syllable with its own tone marking (acute or grave marking), and sometimes that symbol had to appear above the ɛ & ɔ vowels! As any linguist who’s worked with earlier versions of the SIL IPA font set will understand, these typographic features didn’t translate very well, so to speak, from Charles’ computer to my computer. After several months of hair-pulling (including the regretful purchasing of a $40 laptop that was old enough to run the right version of Microsoft Word + SIL font set, but not new to have an ethernet port or USB port to transfer the file), I decided that the only way we were going to get this text published was if I retyped the entire book. And the best thing to do was to do that in LaTeX, which I had ony just begun to learn how to use.

Most people would say that this wasn’t the smartest project to undertake in the midst of (completely unrelated) PhD dissertation fieldwork and thesis writing. It was challenging, time consuming, and a bit tedious. But in my mind, it was totally worth it! I didn’t, however, tell my advisors what I was doing (sorry John & Penny). There were months at a time when I didn’t work on the book, of course. Like most of the first half of 2009. There were many, many days when I didn’t think it would ever happen. I owe a lot of thanks to the people who helped me with LaTeX issues, namely ʻŌiwi Parker Jones and CSLI’s Emma Pease, and a huge debt of gratitude to the head of CSLI publication, Dikran Karagueuzian.

About the book

In my humble opinion, our book is really good! It covers a wide range of levels and topics, from beginners learning the basics, to the very advanced study of things like politics and law. And it has some important, unique features. Twi is a tone language, and our book is the first to include full phonological tone information for all Twi examples. Since we’re linguists, we’ve included a chapter-length Appendix dedicated to describing the standard Twi sound system and syntactic structure, along with practice exercises for students. During my time at Oxford last year I also made an effort to render all the English parts (half of the book) so that they were both linguistically and culturally understandable for speakers of both US- and UK-based Englishes. My favorite thing in the book, though, is the list of idiomatic, colloquial, and euphemistic expressions, including taboo expressions that the learner should try to avoid, and even a few common words and phrases that can easily sound like said taboo expressions, if one is not careful! (I’m proud to say that this bit was my idea, mostly due to the trauma I face every time I need to say the word ‘eight’ in Twi…)

Purchasing

I’ll end my shameless advert here. If you’re interested in ordering our book, you can get it direct from the distributor or check it out on Amazon. Nante yie! (Go well!)

View from a house in Dansoman, Western Accra, Ghana (August 2010)

All About Vocalisation

Time to put the name of this blog to use!  You may recall that one of my motivations for calling this “vocalized/vocalised” is because of my interest in L-vocalization across varieties of English.  That interest is presently taking the form of an online speech perception survey, available to anyone who considers themselves a “linguist” — anyone with any linguistic training, regardless of native language or dialect.  The survey takes roughly 20 minutes (probably less), and if you’re reading this you’re invited to participate:

http://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/423080/Perception-of-L-Vocalization-version-B

Some linguists insist that they can’t ‘hear’ vocalization, and if that’s you, please don’t let that stop you from taking the survey!  That’s part of what we’re interested in looking at.

Thanks in advance for your time and help!  Check back here for details on the results, or come in person to see my talk (with co-author Sonya Fix) on Saturday, 8 January 2011, at the Linguistics Society of America meeting in Pittsburgh, PA.

Why do I do what I do?

Choosing a career in academia, and specifically a career of linguistic research, doesn’t have an immediately obvious benefit for the world in the way that many other jobs do. We’re not discovering medical cures, feeding starving children, or fixing your car. Despite this, I think real-world value exists in linguistics research. In some ways, how active someone wants to be in exploring this value varies from researcher to researcher. For example, work like this book by friends and fellow sociolinguists Anne Charity and Christine Mallinson makes academic research immediately practical, bringing insights directly to classroom teachers. Among linguists, sociolinguists in particular take our language data directly from the mouths of everyday people, and many of us have long recognized the need to give back to those communities that we work with (something eloquently pointed out by one of my PhD advisors, John Rickford, in a paper in in 1997).

For a lot of us, though, exactly how we give back varies considerably; many of us are wracked with guilt for not being able to give back ‘enough’. We sit with our WAV recorders and microphones in the livingrooms of kind strangers who tell us the highs and lows of their life story, and we listen. Then we walk away, out of their home, out of that community, into our office (and in my case, across a continent and an ocean), and in many cases we may not see those strangers again. We didn’t fix their problems, we didn’t feed their children (although the lucky among us have research grant funds to at least pay them for their time), and we certainly didn’t fix their car. We take those stories and we turn them into research papers about the ‘construction of local ideologies’ or the ‘progression of sound change’ or the ‘negotiation of social meaning’. Who cares? Do they care? How can we justify asking a tax-based scientific funding agency to pay for such an endeavor? How can we convince undergraduate students that spending your life doing something like this is something worthwhile?

I have two thoughts on this, one at the level of the person, and one at the level of society.

At the level of the individual, sociolinguists and other social science researchers who rely on interview data are lucky. We’re lucky because a lot of people discover, through the course of an interview, that they love to be interviewed. To the extent that psychotherapy is effective, a certain kind of sociolinguistic interview can provide nearly the same effect. To wit: the vast majority of the 94 people I interviewed in San Francisco thanked me for the opportunity, and for my time. Thanked me for my time. Many of them literally said how much they enjoyed it (by the way, to everyone doing fieldwork right now, it is at this point that you get your best friend-of-a-friend referrals)! A few of them asked for copies of the interview when it was over. One woman had gotten choked up with tears at some point, and at the end said that the interview had been a ‘wonderful’ experience. Mind you, these are not, strictly speaking, ‘oral history’ interviews. I was conducting loosely-structured (i.e., topics raised by the interviewee are followed through) sociolinguistic interviews (the kind designed to get people to just talk a lot, thereby providing a lot of speech to analyze). In other words, as far as I can tell, I was just being a linguist.  But one thing linguistics research does is that it gives a place for people to tell their story… something that is, itself, important for society.

All of that is warm and fuzzy (and, it’s worth noting, not the case for every interview, by any means). But what I think is more interesting, and a harder sell, is the value of linguistics research in general, not just the value for those researchers who are lucky enough to have fieldwork-based data collection methods.

Here’s what I think: linguistics research makes life more full. Not only for the linguist, but for a member of our global society.

(I know, I know, you were with me up to here and now you’re like ‘she’s totally deluding herself’. Maybe so; but that’s why this is a blog, and not a real publication, haha. But hear me out.)

What does linguistics teach us? Simply put: that languages have structure and complexity; that each language is just as structured and complex as the next; that every language makes meaningful contrasts (between sounds or letters or parts of speech or other bits of language); that what those contrasts are is different from language to language. What does this knowledge do for us? For one, it makes us think more abstractly. In a nutshell, thinking more abstractly about our social world makes it easier to see the commonalities across communities, and makes it harder to see our enemies as less than human. Take a concrete example. Person A is a monolingual English speaker sitting on a bus next to Persons B and C who are talking in a non-English language. Person A might very well be annoyed (‘Why can’t they just speak English?!’), or, as the well-known tale goes, she might think that B and C are gossiping about her, intentionally avoiding English to speak in a ‘secret code’. Now, I’m not saying that Person A’s taking a linguistics class in college is going to completely mitigate these reactions. But if we consider that many, many linguists producing lots and lots of research might just change, even slightly, the way people talk about language. And being a member of a society that starts to change in that way might change Person A’s reaction to B and C, even if just a little bit. Current linguistic theories show us how the repetition of these little moments of change over time can become something much larger and more enduring. In other words, the search for answers to the questions in linguistic research may — subtly but crucially — change the way we think about our fellow human beings. I believe that linguistics research is part of a vital academic project that transforms the way we experience our world, for the better. And that is enough motivation, for me.

Old Home, New Home

“This is a city of shifting light, of changing skies, of sudden vistas. A city so beautiful, it breaks the heart again and again.”

– Alexander McCall Smith

A little over two weeks ago, I moved to Edinburgh, Scotland.  The city is breathtaking and the job is fantastic.  But it’s been a pretty sudden change; the first time I ever stepped foot in Edinburgh was on June 6th, for my job interview.  Now that I’ve accepted a permanent post here, the question is, how does one make an unfamiliar place start to feel like home?  One thing I think we all do is quickly latch on to similarities between the new home and the old home.  And on that note, I’d like to present:

The Top 10 Similarities Between Edinburgh & San Francisco

National Archives of Scotland

10.    Similar population size… sort of.  Edinburgh proper is not quite 449,000, but if you include the surrounding areas, it’s 778,000.  San Francisco, not including the surrounding areas, is just over 800,000.  Of course the rest of the Bay Area contributes to the feel of San Francisco, and that is much different than the feel of Edinburgh.  But one might argue (in fact, I’m arguing in a paper right now) that San Franciscans do strongly orient to and identify with their city borders, seeing the rest of the Bay Area as something quite distinct.  I’m not sure what the average Edinburgh resident thinks about the surrounding areas, but until I find out, I’m sticking by this as reason number 10.

9.    Yoga studios, Tibetan gift shops, and even a barber specializing in dreadlock maintenance!  Maybe I’ve been living in Oxford too long, but I haven’t seen, um, ‘granola’ icons like these in quite awhile, and they definitely remind me of San Francisco.  Scotland is well-known to be more liberal than England, and though it’s not at all a fair comparison, some NorCal/SoCal parallels are suggested here.  In any case, something to pursue further with ethnographic goggles on.

8.     There’s a big, beautiful garden in the middle of the city.  Not that anything compares to Golden Gate Park, and of course Princes Street Gardens is much smaller (although Holyrood Park is also nearby, and huge).  But both are iconic of their city, both drawing millions of tourists every year.

Princes Street Gardens

7.     The first question one local asks another is “what school did you go to?”  This is something San Francisco old timers and youngsters alike have told me, and I’ve already heard it about Edinburgh, too.  In both places, one’s social position and even one’s accent are at least associated, if not actually correlated, with where one went to school.  This is true in a lot of cities, of course, but arguably not to the same extent.

6.    It’s a cosmopolitan city that people say is still “like a small town”.

Edinburgh New Town, looking north

5.     Edinburgh sits on a kind of bay, the Firth of Forth.

Firth of Forth

4.     There’s fog & drizzle, even in the summer.  But it’s got fairly temperate weather year-round.  (This is not to say that it doesn’t get darn cold here in the winter.  But the average temperature is never below freezing.)

3.     They both have crazy hilly streets!!  (And the hills don’t all have stairs!)

steps in Edinburgh Old Town

2.     Both San Francisco and Edinburgh are known for their gorgeous views.

Edinburgh view

1.     Edinburgh is obviously way cooler than the much bigger city that’s roughly 6 hours to the south… 

New Job

“An American linguist in Oxford” will soon become “an American linguist in Edinburgh.”  Assuming my work visa goes through, I will be starting in September in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at the University of Edinburgh as Lecturer in Sociolinguistics.  Stay tuned for more info!

in Edinburgh (6 June 2010)

academic rank titles: a rough summary

This table summarizes how I’ve been describing UK & US English differences about academic titles in my recent conversations about this with both Americans and Brits.  I wonder if anyone reading this disagrees with my summary, beyond the fact that these are only approximate correlates, since the UK doesn’t have the tenure system that is so closely (but not completely) tied to the American distinction between Assistant and Associate.  And there are other subtleties I’m glossing over, like the messiness of what “lecturer” means in the US, as well as things like the apparent distinction (at least at Oxford) between a post-doctoral researcher and a post-doctoral fellow, which is why I’ve just put “post-doc” here.  Anyway, if you do disagree with this I’d be curious to know if it’s because of what part of the UK you’re in/from or if it depends on the university you’re at, or what.

Of course, there’s always Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_rank, which just goes to show you how overly simplistic my table is!