This week we got some friendly mail from Superlinguo reader Tiger:

“I’m studying linguistics at university for my undergrad and was essentially just wondering what pathways you guys took, academically or career-wise, to get to where you are! Compiling dictionaries of/doing fieldwork in minority languages is an area that definitely piques my interest, so I thought I’d just ask.”

Thanks for the question! These days Georgia has a full time job doing something that’s not linguistics (but still pretty cool, so we can forgive her) - but she still finds the kind of training that she got while studying linguistics useful in other things that she does (including hanging out here!) so perhaps I’ll leave it to her to tell you what she found useful about linguistics. Today I’ll tell you my story - I’m sorry it’s a bit of a ramble.

I started off taking undergraduate linguistics as part of my bachelors degree. It was on a whim that I decided to take the introductory class, having lived with someone who was studying linguistics the year before, I thought I’d see what she actually studied. I was taken with it immediately, and I’m sure many other people have similar stories. The thing that drew me in was that linguistics combined so many areas that interested me, it had lots of process-driven analysis like science but also tackled issues of history, politics and social interaction.

By the end of my Arts degree I was rounding out my majors in Art History and Linguistics. I was all set on doing an Honours year in Art History with a longer term goal of working in art education at a gallery… no story is worth telling without a little sidetracking. Clearly that was not a career plan that went anywhere, and for that you can blame my third-year lecturer who filled my head full of puzzles about the relationship between language and gesture that only a few weeks before I was set to finish my degree I found myself enrolling in another year of linguistics and that lecturer has not been able to get rid of me since.

For those not in Australia or a similar system, an Honours year is an additional year on a 3 year Bachelor degree. It involves higher level course work and a smallish thesis (10 000 to 20 000 words depending on the institution). I wrote mine about the way people think about gestures. It’s a pretty intense 8 or 9 months of study and definitely gives you a feel for whether academia is set at your pace or not. At the end of that year I was ready to take some time off, had a go at a desk job and then ran away and travelled for a bit.

When I realised that I much preferred the high-stress but personal satisfaction that came with research I caught up with my Honours year supervisor. She suggested I apply for a PhD doing language documentation work (an Honours year gives you the option to bypass Masters). Although completely unrelated to my Honours topic I had shown that I was capable of managing a research task and I had studied most of the basic domains of linguistics in undergraduate courses.

In these last three years I feel like I’ve learned more about linguistics than I could have imagined. My thesis is intended to outline some of the grammatical features of Yolmo, so work like the dictionary, learning Nepali to speak to Yolmo speakers, making an archive of what I’ve done and hanging out here at Superlinguo are all things I do on top of that because I like to.

I’ll hopefully be finishing up my PhD this year - after that I have lots of things I’d like to do but we’ll see how it goes. I’d like to continue my work with Yolmo speakers, but also with related languages in Nepal and further afield. This would involve getting a Post Doctorate position, which basically means finding somewhere to continue working.

Although I have kind of fallen into this work I care passionately about documenting and helping people appreciate the languages they speak. We are losing more languages than we are training people who are willing to document them, and there is relatively scant funding available (considering how little capital is needed to document a language in comparison to, say, try and prevent baldness). Linguistic diversity is important in the way animal and plant diversity are important, each language is a unique variation on the cognitive skills of the human brain, and that is why I’m proud to do the work that I do, even if it means that I will be more than ten years out of high school before I earn something equivalent to a real wage.

So that’s me, and each person finds their own way into these things. I know people who have gone off and worked in language centres, or other jobs, and come back to do this kind of research in their 40s and 50s, and people who have managed to string together small amounts of work and grants to let them keep working outside of getting a PhD. I know people who got into language documentation because their father-in-law spoke an interesting language, because they happened to work on a language for a university project and it spiraled into something bigger, or because they married a linguist and discovered they also liked the work. If you want to do this kind of thing here are some vague bullet points as to how you might make it happen, but I’m sure you’ll find your own way. Don’t worry too much though - you might think you want to make dictionaries and end up working in a gallery!

• If you’re in high school do the Linguistics Olympiad.

• If your university offers an undergraduate linguistics course, take it! Just about every part of a linguistics degree is helpful in language documentation, but make sure you definitely cover things like phonetics, phonology, syntax and morphology.

• If you don’t have undergraduate linguistics do things like modern languages, ancient languages, history, psychology, literature, computer science - anything that involves language, cognition and/or critical thinking.

• If you’re thinking of doing a Masters or PhD make sure the university you want to attend has a good reputation for language documentation.

• Talk to your lecturers, they’re generally excited by the enthusiasm of students.

• When you’re near the end of your undergraduate degree definitely go and talk to lecturers, get a feeling for whether they’re the kind of person you’d like to work with on an Honours or Masters project, and see if they like you too!

• While you’ve worked up the courage to talk to them, as if they have any work for a research assistant. They may say no, but you’ve got nothing to lose. Pick their brains about what type of voluntary work might be around.

• See if there are any language centres or refugee English teaching programs around.

• Read some pop linguistics, and keep dropping by Superlinguo!