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.

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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.

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