In this month’s linguistics job interview Amelia Violet provides a great illustration of how students in STEM pathways can benefit from skills learnt in the arts and humanities. I’m glad there’s at least one engineer out there who knows the semantic implications different English modal verbs!
What did you study at university?
I
studied a double degree of Mechanical Engineering and Arts, majoring in
Linguistics. My areas of focus for linguistics was syntax and
semantics, with a focus on the grammar of English.
What is your job?
As
a standards engineer, I develop and maintain the standard documents and
drawings that my company uses for construction projects. Each day will
involve reviewing feedback from the rest of the business, checking our
documentation, and proposing changes in order to improve our work to
make it safer, work better, or save money in construction. If those
changes are approved, I will develop the exact language to achieve the
desired end goal, and publish a new document.
For
example, in standard documentation, the difference between a “shall” or
a “should” is hugely important, and can have legal ramifications if not
interpreted and adhered to correctly. I need to ensure a paragraph on
the minimum requirements for say, a particular pipe, is clear and easy
to interpret - I work hard to remove accidental syntactic ambiguity, as
it can have serious, real world ramifications.
How does your linguistics training help you in your job?
I
never expected it to help, but as mentioned in the above question, part
of my work involves ensuring our documents are clear and unambiguous. A
strong syntactic understanding of English has both improved my ability
to find problems, but also have technical understanding of how to
structure phrases for clarity of meaning. Interpreting and writing standard documentation often requires treating language like a series of semantic logic puzzles.
Do you have any advice do you wish someone had given to you about linguistics/careers/university?
I
wish I had been told just how much my arts degree would develop soft
skills that I could use to help sell myself and get a job in
engineering. I initially studied linguistics for fun, to break the
monotony of constant maths in my other degree. I had no intention of
trying to get a job utilising my linguistics studies. However, as I went
through job applications trying to break into the industry, I was
frequently complimented on my writing ability, and fielded questions
about majoring in linguistics in many interviews from curious potential
employers.
While I have an engineering
role now, I do far more report writing than complicated mathematics,
which was an almost neglected skill during my actual engineering degree.
Instead, my ability to write reports, conduct research for design
changes, and communicate clearly with the rest of the business, all came
from skills developed while studying linguistics and philosophy, my
minor.
Any other thoughts or comments?
Whatever
the reason you have for studying linguistics, you will pick up
something that will benefit other parts of your life - perhaps not now,
but one day in the future. You never know what kind of work you may take
on, and what skills will become relevant! Plus, it’s always reliable
for fun dinner table conversations!
With so many more major films and TV shows using constructed languages to build realistic and novel worlds, constructed languages are a great way to teach people about how language works.
David Adger and Coppe van Urk at Queen Mary University London ran a week conlanging course for year 10 students (~15 year olds). The students were introduced to phonetics, phonology, morphology, as well as word order, agreement and
case (syntax). They also created a script for their language.
David has written about the course on his blog. It sounds like the students really took to it:
The students looked at conlangs including Tolkien’s Sindarin, Peterson‘s Dothraki, Okrand’s Klingon, David’s Warig, Nolan‘s Parseltongue, and various others. They even had a guest lecture from Francis Nolan on Parseltongue, which he created for the Harry Potter films!
David also shared the summary posters that the students made for their language. Here’s one of my favourites:
Find out more about the Creating a Language course on the course page and David’s blog. Similarly, David J. Peterson has just finished running a summer course at UC Berkley called “The Linguistics of Game of Thrones and the Art of Language Invention”. Conlanging is a great way to get students to think about the structure of language. It’s a great time to use conlangs in the classroom!
The Virtual Linguistics Campus - University-level linguistics online
The Virtual Linguistics Campus bills itself as “the world’s largest linguistics pMOOC Curriculum”. I took the opportunity to register and poke around their website. It is, indeed, a comprehensive set of educational resources. You can register for free to access any of their linguistics courses (from what I can tell they make money from selling courses in CSS and HTML).
Here’s the home screen for their Linguistics 101 ‘Fundamentals’. It covers more or less what I’ve seen in most introductory courses. Each course section includes videos to introduce content, worksheets, readings and questions to answer. If you’re thinking of studying linguistics, or don’t have access to a course at your university this could be a structured way to learn more.
The full list of courses currently available is below. Even if you don’t want to register to do their courses all the videos are available on Youtube from what I can gather.
Many of the people we’ve featured in the Linguistics Jobs series have taken their linguistics training into sometimes unexpected fields. Tiger Webb’s job, however, is all about being able to understand how language is used. In 2014 I joined Tiger for a chat on ABC RN’s The List about quotability in pop culture. Now the tables are turned, and I interview Tiger about his degree and his job. Tiger is on Twitter, and his four-part radio series Given Names is definitely worth a listen.
1. What did you study at university?
I started out on an international studies degree at Macquarie University,
majoring in English Language and Literature. One of the required units
for that at the time was Language: Its Structure and Use.
It was a brilliant intro—introductory Chomsky! What railroad accidents can teach you about psycholinguistics! Lots of references to Lewis Carroll! After it, I was hooked, and enrolled in more and more linguistics units.
Macquarie, even pre-Hearing Hub, very strong on speech sciences. Our Phonetics and Phonology classes taught by Felicity Cox, who literally wrote the book on transcribing Australian English. I also studied radio a bit, which is how I initially ended up in the ABC building.
2. What is your job?
Among other things, I’m a researcher for ABC Language.
This
means: I provide pronunciation guidance for placenames and personal
names, update the ABC’s internal database of same, provide comment on
audience complaints to do with pronunciation, grammar and terminology,
and provide recommendations to folk who have thorny language questions.
I don’t do this alone: there’s a larger ABC Language Committee, headed by Ed Pols
svengali Alan Sunderland. The Committee meets once a month and produces
a report based on what it has discussed. The first time I wrote one,
Sarah Ferguson accused me of using too many em dashes. I defended myself
at the time—but upon reflection, she was probably correct.
3. How does your linguistics training help you in your job?
I
think even a little bit of linguistic study provides a pretty crucially
important framework for analysing language. Even very basic concepts,
like: language is in a constant state of flux! or, it’s pointless and
actually kind of mean to privilege one dialect over another!
It can also be helpful to come back at complaints about (uniformly
female) vocal fry with actual acoustic data in the form of waveforms or
spectrograms.
Corpora stuff help, too—in some
circumstances the ABC might need to work out what term to recommend for a
given issue, and collocates are one way of figuring out whether a
particular term has pejorative connotations, for example.
4. Do you gave any advice do you wish someone had given to you about linguistics/careers/university?
Maybe
that it existed? I sort of fell into it, both at uni and at work, by
happy accident. I would have loved to known that you can actually be a
lexicographer when I was in high school.
5. Any other thoughts or comments?
Maybe
just that I’m contactable on Twitter if people are taking umbrage with
ABC newsreaders/presenters, or think we’re pronouncing stuff wrong?
In this installment of ‘linguistics jobs’ we chat with Jason, who is a high school teacher in Australia. Jason did undergrad at Monash University with other linguist friends of mine, including Rosey (whose linguistics baking has feature on Superlinguo before). Jason teaches junior and middle level classes, as well as VCE (Victorian Certificate of Education), which is the final 2 years of secondary schooling in Victoria, Australia. VCE has an awesome subject called ‘English Language’, which is basically a Linguistics of English subject.
What did you
study at university?
I first enrolled in a bachelor of Arts/Law but quickly transferred into pure Arts, taking a
major in linguistics and a minor in classical studies. At some point something
clicked in my head and I decided I wanted to learn as much as I could about
languages so I thought I’d start with ancient languages. I used to scour the
library for books about Sanskrit and things like that, and make up my own
scripts and languages during lectures when I probably should have been
listening. I already had French and learning Latin made so many things switch
on in my brain. I can only describe it as an enlightening experience. The
linguistics I studied included the introductory subjects, semantics, the
structure, history and sociolinguistics of English (all with Kate Burridge),
Aboriginal languages, phonetics and phonology, language endangerment and
documentation (with Simon Musgrave) and a subject on Eastern Austronesian
languages.
After my
degree I completed a further 2 years of undergraduate study to gain a major in
French and a minor in English Lit, due to my desire to become a teacher and
have the necessary prerequisites. Then I did a one-year Graduate Diploma of Education, also at Monash, specialising in French and
English methods.
What
is your job?
I’m a secondary school teacher in an all-girls government school. I
teach VCE mainly, in French and English Language. Day to day I plan my classes,
deliver my lessons, develop course materials, consult with colleagues about the
directions to take with certain things, and grade work of course.
How
does your linguistics training help you in your job?
My linguistics training has been crucial. English Language draws on a lot
of my linguistics study, and also keeps me in touch with how people think and
write about language. It allows me to bring these ideas to young people,
something really special considering when I left high school I had no notion of
what linguistics was other than knowing languages and maybe writing grammar
books on them. Not only this, but it has given me a very tolerant and
descriptive approach to language generally which helps me lead in-class
discussions and educate future generations about the complexity and diversity
of language (especially through the subjects I happen to teach!). In French it
also has equipped me with some interesting methods of teaching an inflecting
language that has a long tradition of being taught in certain ways.
Do you
have any advice do you wish someone had given to you about linguistics/careers/university?
I suppose I
wish I had realised what it was before I stumbled upon it. Linguistics
has always had a hard time being recognised by the wider community as something
separate to language learning, interpretation & translation, etc. I wish
that people like you guys had been around 10-15 years ago to educate kids that
there are careers you can do in studying language itself!
Any
other thoughts or comments?
I think that I
personally shied away from pursuing linguistics as an academic career, but there is a
strong part of me that wants to go out to “save the languages”. I’m happy to be
helping out by informing young people that there is this “thing called
linguistics” that exists and they should study it.
Anonymous asked:
If I wanted to study linguistics at University, do you think that learning a programming language would look good on my application and/ or be useful?
We really do hope you want to study linguistics at University!
There are lots of ‘it depends’ in the answer I want to give to this, so I’ll just give you my tl;dr answer first and then I’ll explain:
Yes, programming languages are super-useful for many areas of linguistics. I wish I were better at them, but there’s no use doing something you won’t enjoy if you could be doing something else.
OK, so now the long answer.
Obviously there are some areas of linguistics where programming is going to be impossible to avoid: every acoustic phonetician I know works with R, large corpora aren’t going to manipulate themselves, and you aren’t going to get far in computational linguistics if you can’t computate.
You could get very far in language documentation without ever typing a line of code (it’s the field I spend the most time in). Having said that, you can do some things a whole lot quicker if you learn a bit of coding - Even I can wrangle some Regular Expressions to manipulate large amounts of data and find useful things (I often tell people that RegEx is like gateway programming). I’ve also ended up kicking around in HTML for this site and others, (carto)CSS for map making and I wrote very simple Praat scripts for a class once. Basically, I can’t code at all really, but I’m not afraid of it, and I’d learn more if I had the time and the right project.
It’s also a good general skill. Let’s me honest, not everyone who studies linguistics ends up as a linguist (although they do end up with some cool jobs!). Adding something like coding to your skill-set makes you a more generally employable person after your degree. Programming languages also give you a different perspective on language. So there’s another interesting perspective you might get adding a programming language to your resume. Coding also involves a degree of systematic thought that often reminds me of solving a syntax problem, so if you enjoy linguistics there might be some parts of programing you enjoy too.
Having said all of that do not learn a programming language if you won’t enjoy it. You’ll find an area of linguistics where it isn’t a central skill. It might mean there are times where you have to work with someone who has those skills, but many people build very successful working partnerships that way. If you are really only thinking of your resume do something that you’ll love - learn sign language! Spend time in another country or language! Volunteer at a local language centre!
Of course, I haven’t talked about what language in particular. If you are really interested in programming then doing a general course in a common language will give you the skills that you can apply to a different language later on.
Whether you decide to do programming or not, you’ll find your place in linguistics!
There have been a few emails advertising Summer Research programs in Australia and I wanted to share them. These are definitely more common now than when I was an undergrad, and they’re a great way to use your linguistics skills, see if research is for you and perhaps experience a department at a different university. They usually have a small travel and living stipend included. If you are in the wrong hemisphere, or you need to work over the summer months like I did as an undergrad, these types of notifications can still be useful - they let you know the kind of work specific researchers are interested in and what kinds of honours or grad research a particular department might be interested in. If you see more of these programs around let me know and I’ll Tweet them! Remember, it’s the Southern Hemisphere, so Uni summer break is November - February.
Linguistics students are invited to help us create dictionaries of
Indigenous Australian languages at the ARC Centre of Excellence for the
Dynamics of Language (CoEDL). You will also be able to take part in the CoEDL Summer School at the University of Western Sydney, and the Australian Linguistics Society Annual Conference.
The
project will involve different aspects of dictionary-making, depending
on the interests of the scholar/intern, from computational to
lexicographic to documentary to transcription of primary data. The
supervisor is Professor Jane Simpson, and there will be plenty of
opportunity to work with other scholars of Indigenous languages.
Project duration: 7 weeks, January 4 – February 19
Australia’s indigenous languages are famed for their complex word
structures, making them highly informative for our understanding of how
human language works. This project unearths that complexity and
organises it into computer-readable form, in order to contribute
to cutting-edge research on data visualisation in linguistics
(including a concurrent, related summer project in computer science at
UQ), and to electronic resources that will underlie the coming
generation of indigenous language apps.
We are seeking students in a linguistics major at second year level or
higher, at any Australian or international university. Some study in the
areas of morphology, phonology, or both, is preferred.
Project duration: 7 weeks, January 4 – February 19
Bruce Sommer worked for decades with indigenous peoples throughout Cape
York, recording a vast amount of language material, most of which he
deposited with UQ’s Fryer Library. This project will begin to enrich
Sommer’s records, by bringing it out of archival
boxes and into more readily accessible forms, specifically, by creating
electronically readable and deliverable versions of some of his
thousands of pages of notes on traditional stories, grammar, vocab and
culture.
We are seeking students in a linguistics major at second year level or
higher, at any Australian or international university. Some study in the
areas of phonology and phonetics is preferred.
The Garrwa language is spoken in the Gulf Country around the town of
Borroloola (NT) and east towards the Queensland Border. Children no
longer learn Garrwa as a first language but there are a number of older
Garrwa people in and around Borroloola and the community
of Robinson River who are keen to ensure that the language is
well-documented and taught to young people to maintain and revitalise
cultural and linguistic heritage and practices. They are particularly
interested in the production of a dictionary to sit alongside
the recently published reference grammar (Mushin, I. 2012. A grammar of
(Western) Garrwa. Mouton). The first stage of this project will be to
work through an older draft dictionary from 1997 and checked with
speakers in 2006-2010 to compile an initial list
of entries and, where possible, match with recordings of the words.
Students will learn practical skills in language documentation and the
development of dictionary entries, as well as learning about the Garrwa
language.
We are seeking students in a linguistics major at second year level or higher, at any Australian or international university.
This project will form a part of an ARC project examining changes in
Gurindji Kriol across two generations of Gurindji people. It will
compare the speech of 10 year old Gurindji children with the linguistic
input they received as babies. The Summer Research
scholar will be trained in linguistic annotation, transcription of
Gurindji Kriol and will code transcribed recordings in preparation for
statistical analysis. The focus will be on changes in the use of
ergative marking in Gurindji Kriol. The Summer Research
scholar will work with other scholars building Gurindji and Mudburra
corpora and can potentially development an Honours thesis from the
project.
This project will form a part of an ARC project examining a trilingual
Indigenous community, Elliott (NT). It examines how people at Elliott
manage multiple languages and how these languages have changed through
mixing processes such as creolisation and code-switching.
Summer Research scholars will be a part of a team including PhD
students Claire Gourlay and David Osgarby trained in corpus development.
They will key in transcribed recordings of Mudburra and sound-link the
corpus. Summer Research scholars will work with
other scholars building the Gurindji corpus. If students are interested
in potential Honours topics on Mudburra at UQ, a day a week can be
allocated to background research.
This project will form a part of the Centre of Excellence in the
Dynamics of Language building a corpus of Gurindji recordings for the
language community and linguistic research. Gurindji is spoken in the
Northern Territory (Australia). Summer Research scholars
will be a part of a team trained in corpus development. They will key
in transcribed recordings of Gurindji and sound-link the corpus. Summer
Research scholars will work with other scholars building the Mudburra
corpus.
This is the second in our ‘linguistics
jobs’ series—which means it is now actually a series! We have a few more
interviews coming your way in the months ahead. If you found an awesome non-academic
job after your linguistics degree and want to share your story, contact us!
I met Benjamin Riley during our undergrad
days at The University of Melbourne. We both majored in linguistics, and
although we were never in a subject together it didn’t stop us from spending a
lot of time talking about language, linguistics and almost anything else (and we still do today). You can follow Ben
on Twitter and read his work at The
Star Observer.
What did you study at university?
I studied a Bachelor of Arts at the University of
Melbourne, with a double major in political science and linguistics, alongside
a concurrent diploma in Russian language. I completed an honours year
(part-time across two years) in linguistics, where I wrote a thesis alongside
further coursework. The thesis was primarily a lexical analysis of Australian
news media aimed at testing a model for describing “political correctness”.
I loved the breadth of my linguistics major, and
appreciated the chance to train a pretty wide range of academic muscles—picking
apart complex syntactic structures is a far cry from critical discourse
analysis, but both are fascinating. I enjoyed studying most areas of the
discipline (with the exceptions of second language learning and phonetics… I
still don’t get the academic appeal) but tended to gravitate more towards
topics based in sociolinguistics and cognitive linguistics.
What is
your job?
I’m a journalist and editor, working for
an LGBTI publication called the Star
Observer, which publishes online news and a monthly print publication with
more of a focus on magazine-style features. We’re national—based out of Sydney,
but I run the Melbourne office. I cover Victorian and national news, with a
focus on politics and HIV. I also serve as the publication’s deputy editor, and
given it’s such a small organisation, tend to do a little bit of everything.
How does
your linguistics training help you in your job?
There are a couple of very direct ways
my linguistics degree helps in my job. A solid understanding of grammatical
structures is obviously an asset in editing—it’s much easier to convince an
editor of something if you can back it up with jargon-y linguistic arguments.
More importantly, the focus in my linguistics degree on critical analysis of all
sorts of written and spoken discourse (including news media) gave me a
fantastic grounding in being able to engage critically with the news I read and
the news I write.
But really, I would say the benefits of my linguistics
degree lie in its broad engagement with the humanities and social sciences.
Linguistics is an incredibly diverse discipline, and studying it got me curious
in so many other areas of inquiry: psychology, sociology, politics, philosophy,
anthropology… the list goes on. That breadth also encourages linguistics
students to think critically about what they’re studying—it’s hard to take so
many diverse and often conflicting ways of looking at the world at face value.
Curiosity and critical thinking are, I would argue, the most important traits a
journalist can possess, and studying linguistics helped me develop those in
spades.
Do you
gave any advice do you wish someone had given to you about
linguistics/careers/university?
Following on from the previous question,
I’d say the best piece of advice I could give to someone at university (and
this probably applies to early career decisions, too) is to be curious. Try new
things, and figure out what engages you. And demand a lot from the people
you’re learning from—I changed my majors a number of times until I found a
discipline that not only sparked my interest, but was taught by an engaging and
passionate department. Also remember each next step isn’t heading towards some
grand goal in the distance, it’s just the next step.
Any other thoughts or comments?
Studying humanities and social
sciences—and linguistics in particular—taught me how to better live in the
world. The curiosity and critical thinking skills I developed in my degree, in
a course that felt almost like a taster for a broad range of big ideas, have
shaped not only what I’m now doing professionally, but who I am as a person. I
really can’t put a high enough value on that.
As promised in this post, and inspired by these interviews at ATL, we’re starting a series of interviews with people who studied linguistics at some point in their university degree and have gone on to interesting and varied jobs. OK, to be honest, it’s mostly just me chatting with friends from my student days. If you found a rad non-academic job after your linguistics degree and want to be interviewed, contact us!
Our first interview is with Aidan Wilson, who was doing his MA at Melbourne Uni while I was there for my PhD. His beard was not quite as well groomed in his student days. You can follow Aidan on Twitter.
What did you study at university?
My first degree was a
Bachelor of Liberal Studies with Honours in Linguistics from the
University of Sydney. A Bachelor of Liberal Studies requires you to
complete a major in both science and arts, as well as a few additional
components, such as two years of a language and a year of mathematics. I
picked up linguistics as a means of filling up credit points, as I
really wanted to do philosophy, but very soon I decided that linguistics
was where my heart lay. My studies ran
the whole gamut of the discipline, from the structure of language
through to theoretical syntax, field methods, sociolinguistics,
psycholinguistics, semantics and pragmatics. My science major was in
History and Philosophy of Science (probably as arts-y as you can get in
the Science faculty). My linguistics honours year was a self-directed
project studying the Wagiman language, which included two trips to the
field to work with speakers.
After
taking a few years off studying (although continuing to work on
research projects), I went on to complete a Master of Arts in
linguistics from the University of Melbourne. There was some coursework
associated with this, such as a brilliant and informative unit on the
history of the discipline, but the degree really focused on the thesis. I
studied the verbal morphology of the Traditional Tiwi language, a
language that had received too little analysis, and which was under
serious threat of disappearing completely, further encouraged by the
spread of Modern Tiwi (typologically speaking, a very different
language) in the Tiwi Islands. The last speakers of Traditional Tiwi
died in 2012, meaning my thesis might be the last record of the complex verb morphology of that language.
What is your job?
My current role is Data Analyst at Intersect,
which is an organisation that supports NSW universities achieve better
results through eResearch capabilities. I’m currently working with
universities in NSW to enable them to publish information about the
research data collections their researchers have produced so that other
researchers can easily find the material and even re-use it. I also
assist Intersect with other areas that have become my expertise over the
years, such as research data collection metadata standards and
management.
Does your linguistics training help you in your job?
I think my arts
training, including linguistics, has helped me a great deal in my job,
but not so tangibly. An arts degree is incredibly good training for
one’s research skills, and the way they conceive of a problem. These
skills (and more besides) are incredibly useful for any job where you
have to be creative. More tangibly, my work as a digital archivist,
which I did throughout my education, has given me skills that I use
every day in my work.
Do you gave any advice do you wish someone had given to you about linguistics/careers/university?
Adding more skills to your toolkit, like programming
languages, regular expressions, or even information management and
library studies, will make you much more employable that if you spend
your entire education focused on just your research. You can do this by
making yourself available as a research assistant on other researchers
interesting projects. Helping out others with your skills is very
rewarding, and you’ll also earn money!
Any other thoughts?
Don’t
think that just because you won’t directly make use of your degree that
it’s somehow useless. There are untold benefits of humanities degrees
that aren’t obvious, but things like the way you approach new problems
and the creativity with which you attack them, are skills that you learn
in a higher degree.
This letter turned up in the Superlinguo mailbox a few weeks ago. It concerns the awe and excitement of finding an amazing professor that reminded me of some of my early years in linguistics. Obviously we’re not talking about romantic crushes, because they’re vaguely weird and this is a blog about linguistics, not romancing. We have no intention of naming the school (or teacher) but the letter comes via this rad linguist and all ‘round good nerd.
So, it turns out that my Syntax professor’s Ph.D advisor was Noam Chomsky. Now I’m trying not to freak out because he’s my favorite professor and he tells us to call him by his first name and he’s really smart and he knows Chomsky???!!!!
It is a difficult fact of life that there are some linguistics professors who are incredibly awesome, and the rest of us must continue to function as intelligent humans around them, rather than just bask in the glow of their awesomeness.
It is my theory that this is mostly how linguistics perpetuates itself. Most of us wander into a first year course going 'I wonder what this linguistics is?’ and with the right amount of charisma, hilarious syntax tree jokes and unique lecture fashion choices you’re hooked and wake up 5 years later with a Masters and knowledge of the IPA (I often tell the story of how I had life all planned out for after my BA, and then thanks to one awesome teacher I found myself in honours, and then I lost track of time and now have a PhD).
As an Australian, the social complexities of moving to a first-name basis with professorial staff are somewhat lost on me. I called all of my teachers, from PhD candidate level tutors to full professors, by their first name. It’s a very Australian bad habit that gets me into trouble in job interviews. My students in Singapore and I have come to an agreeable middle-ground and I’m often addressed as 'Dr Lauren’.
As for being acquainted with Chomsky… I guess your linguistic world-view somewhat determines the value of such proximity to linguistic fame. Hardcore functionalists might see this as a mark against your supervisor’s character. I personally think it’s cool (and one of my supervisors can cite Chomsky as a supervisoral grandparent).
So, I guess the main thing is just keep cool - the best thing about academia is that senior researchers and teachers love enthusiasm . Make the most of your enthusiastic and engaging teachers!
