This series has covered dozens of various jobs, but one industry that has not often been featured is performing arts. This month, however, I had the pleasure of interviewing Anu Bhaskararaman, a talented performing artiste and editor in Chennai. Anu has studied and performed in a myriad of dance styles and also uses her Linguistics background in her freelance work as an editor.
I have a BA in English from Stella Maris College, Chennai and an MA in Linguistics from SOAS, University of London. The MA was a general Linguistics Master’s, but a lot of the subjects I chose were in the fields of Documentation and Revitalisation.
What is your job?
I used to work as an editor at a publishing firm in the English Language Department. We worked on textbooks for schools. In India, we have different boards of education and the curriculum for each board is different. We worked on a material for a couple of different boards. After a year of working at the firm, I switched to freelancing as an editor and went full-time into performing arts, focusing on dance. I am a Bharatanatyam dancer and have been training in this form for close to 22 years. I also learnt ballet for two years between 2010 and 2012. In 2018, I went to Attakkalari Centre for Movement Arts, Bangalore, where we trained primarily in Kalaripayattu, Bharatanatyam and Contemporary, and additionally in Chhau, Modern and Ballet.
I have now started classes where I teach Bharatanatyam, and also assist my teacher in her class and perform solo as well with class ensemble. On a daily basis, I teach dance, learn dance and music, have practice sessions at home and my dance class, and also workout. I helped found and edit an online magazine for performing arts in India called Kaleidoculture with a colleague. I also have dance projects that I work on solo as well as with various colleagues, so all of this definitely keeps me busy! Sometimes, there is editing work in addition but the good thing is, since I freelance, I’m able to figure out my schedule. I also end up working from home a lot.
How does your linguistics training help you in your job?
Linguistics does not really come in for me where dance and other performing arts are concerned. However, training in linguistics has been very useful for my editing job. My workplace dealt with textbooks where the focus was on teaching English. For very young grades, being able to understand language acquisition and phonetics to a certain extent, even at a basic level really helped.
I loved studying Linguistics especially because I have loved languages and everything to do about languages since I was very young. From that perspective, I think my degree was useful in helping me understand people and languages around me. I am able to see the many ways in which language affects people and society, so even if it doesn’t directly help in my job right now I would still say that it has been useful.
What was the transition from university to work like for you?
I came back to India after a year in London for my Master’s, but I started looking out for jobs fairly soon. The job hunt was put on the backseat for a bit when performance season came up here. Since I had been away for a year and not had much opportunity to perform, I was looking forward to throwing myself into practice and performance. Once that was done, I got the job at my publishing firm a couple of months later. My workplace was very enthusiastic about the fact that I had studied linguistics and tried to use as much as they possibly could, so the transition was quite easy. It also helped that I had studied and enjoyed studying literature for my undergrad, so it was a nice coming together of sorts of both my degrees.
Do you have any advice you wish someone had given to you about linguistics/careers/university?
I wish someone had told me how useful it would have been to study Linguistics for my BA as well. I loved studying Literature but I also felt like there was a lot I had to catch up on for my Master’s, which only added pressure. I also wish there was more information on pursuing Linguistics in India, especially as a career. It was almost impossible to find a job. I even signed up as a volunteer linguist for a project and did not hear back.
The Linguistics Jobs Interview series is edited by Martha Tsutsui Billins. Martha is a linguist whose research focuses on the Ryukyuan language Amami Oshima, specifically honourifics and politeness strategies in the context of language endangerment. Martha runs Field Notes, a podcast about linguistic fieldwork.
Evidentiality is one of my favourite features of language. English
has different grammatical forms of verbs for tense (past, present and
future), but some languages also have different grammatical forms
depending on the source of knowledge about an event. If you saw
something, heard someone talk about it or known it as a common fact,
you’ll use different forms of a verb in some languages. In fact, about a
quarter of the world’s languages do this. the family of Tibetan
languages are one such group of languages. A lot of the details of these
systems is still poorly understood. In 2014 Nathan Hill and I ran a
workshop on the topic, and we’re pleased to announce that there is now
an edited book on the topic.
This book contains chapters that
describe the evidential systems of particular languages, including
Lhasa Tibetan, Emigre Tibetan, Purik Tibetan, Denjongke, Dzongkha, Amdo
Tibetan, Zhollam Tibetan and Pingwu Baima. There are also chapters that
focus on historical development of evidentiality in the area, or on
specific features, I have one on egophoric evidentials, Nathan has one
on the perfect experiential and there’s one on the different uses of the
verb snang in different varieties. There’s also a typological
overview of Tibetan evidentiality from Nicolas Tournadre. The book
should be available from research libraries!
Bonus facts:
It
only took around three years from workshop to publication, which is
pretty speedy in academia. We’re pretty thrilled that we get to share
this work.
I wrote the index for the book. It’s the first index
I’ve ever done, and quite possibly the last. It was a difficult (but
rewarding) task, and gave me some interesting insights into the book.
This edited volume brings together work on the evidential systems of Tibetan languages. This includes diachronic research, synchronic description of systems in individual Tibetan varieties and papers addressing broader theoretical or typological questions. Evidentiality in Tibetan languages interacts with other features of modality, interactional context and speaker knowledge states in ways that provide important perspectives for typologists and our general understanding of evidential systems. This book provides the first sustained attempt to capture this complexity and diversity from both a synchronic and diachronic perspective.
Today’s interview is with Braden Curtis. I’m really glad that he’s added his experience to the linguistics jobs interview series, because more and more graduates are going to end up doing the kind of digital media jobs that didn’t even exist when I graduated from university. Braden’s website (Ordworks) houses his photography, video work, book and collection of game designs - he’s a man of many skills!
What did you study at university? I received a basic B.A. in Linguistics, with a minor focus (would you believe it, I can’t remember if it was ever an official
minor, but the sentiment was there) in Japanese, including a few chunks
of study abroad. My focus, loose as it was as an undergrad, was on
syntax and semantics, and I had a vested interest in redefining
prescriptive rules of foreign grammars—Japanese’s particularly—that, as I
saw it, got in the way of their acquisition. (I advocated a more
descriptive understanding of the language’s basic building blocks.
Agglutination, ho!)
2. What is your job? I’m
presently the Digital Managing Editor for Townsquare Media Missoula, a
cluster of seven local radio stations, including a country station, a
rock station, a top 40 pop station, three news stations, and a brand-new
alternative music station. Really, I’m our personalities’ Blog Mommy; I
oversee and attempt to enhance local entertainment content on our
various digital platforms, including our websites, social media, and
video platforms.
3. How does your linguistics training help you in your job? Does
linguistics training ever not help? Less glibly, my background with
linguistics gives me a different perspective from many of my peers in
the other markets of our parent company’s holdings—specifically, I care
much less about perfect grammar and much more about effective communication.
So long as they take care of the major pitfalls that get in the way of
message receipt (or that twist the meaning of their intended message),
e.g. spelling or typographical errors, wholly mangled syntax, etc., I
counsel my team that allowing their personal voice (remember: these are
radio DJs—voice is everything to them) to come through is not only
acceptable, it’s possibly the most distinctive and valuable element of
their work.
4. Do you have any advice do you wish someone had given to you about linguistics/careers/university? Linguistics,
I’ve often said, is the Science of the Humanities—and it can be just as
distancing as that makes it sound. If you’re not careful, it’s easy to
climb up into an (academic) ivory tower, and distance yourself from the
very thing that matters—not just the language of the people, but the people themselves.
But, if you temper your knowledge with compassion, if you let
linguistics’ fundamental tenets (insofar as at least some of us see
them) of observing and seeking to understand things as they are, not
things as they might be, I think that linguistics can make you more human. Right now (and evermore), we could use as much humanity as we can get.
In terms of style and grammar, “Obama met Putin on Tuesday” is understood by everyone, with no loss of meaning despite the fact that an American writer might leave the preposition out. “Obama met Putin Tuesday” is potentially jarring for a significant part of the audience, I feel, and might make those readers less likely to continue with the story.
There are other tricks, like writing “two and a half miles” instead of 2.5 miles – the former is broader, not as formal and makes you dwell less on the fact that you might live in a metric jurisdiction, and you are more likely to plough on with reading rather than pull up and try and perform some mental arithmetic. The aim is to draw as many people as possible into the content and have them feel comfortable reading it right through.
I really do think if we work thoughtfully we can weed out a great deal of localised, exclusive language, without having to bleed the writing of all colour or get too wound up about whether it’s “realise” or “realize” in an individual piece.
This is a really interesting perspective on editing the grammar and style of an online news source that has readers from different English-speaking parts of the world.
