|
About meWhen I tell non-linguists that I'm a linguist, they usually say: "Oh nice! How many languages do you speak?" I'm sure that many of you have been asked the same question. Or another good one: "So like you study literature, but a little different?" Sure! The reason I'm saying this is because the picture above (photo credit Michał Paradowski, thanks for showing me this incredible place after AERA!) I chose shows me in exactly such a situation and could therefore be a bit misleading. So this is me in the San Diego Central Library totally fascinated by ALL those books in ALL those languages! One could think that I do study literature in multiple languages in a way then, right? But, as David Crystal in A Little Book of Languages explains, "the aim of linguistics is not to be fluent in lots of languages. It aims to discover how these languages work. Each of the 6,000 or so languages in the world works in a different way...[but] only a few...have been really well studied" (2010: 240). (By the way, the book was written in 2010, so I really hope that there are still "6,000 or so languages" to be studied.) That said, I actually do love learning languages. I think it is fascinating to travel and be able to talk to people abroad in other languages than mainstream English as a lingua franca. It's so much easier to start conversations, it opens doors to people's homes (literally), allows you to try local food (which I also love), and, very importantly as a researcher on second language acquisition, it really shows you the struggle every language learner goes through! So I do think that every (applied) linguistics researcher should learn (at least) another language. This tells you something else about me, too. I'm also an educator and think that learning is such an enriching experience. I also think that we need to redefine learning and detach it from these formal, instructional contexts because it happens everywhere, all the time. The main advantage of this: We would all have access to it and could learn more from each other. So let's start the dialogue, let's work together on improving our research, let's support each other, and finally, let's do something we love! |