Superlinguo has a range of resources about studying linguistics, and how this relates to skills, jobs and careers. This post links to all the resources across this blog.
Over 80 interviews, published between 2015 and 2022. Listed in reverse chronological order. The 2022 interviews were conducted by Martha Tsutsui-Billins.
I teamed up qualitative researcher Dr Anuja Cabraal to use the first 50 interviews in the Superlinguo series as the basis of an article, published in Language. This article also includes an overview of careers and skills for humanities and linguistics students, and ways we can do better at helping students connect the skills they’ve learnt with future careers.
The Superlinguo series has ended, but I still strongly encourage you to do interviews. This post includes information about why it’s good to interview people, and how to interview people about their jobs and careers, including how I ran the Superlinguo interviews.
Excerpts from five of the Superlinguo Linguistics Job Interviews are featured in the second edition of the introductory linguistics textbook For The Love of Language (Burridge & Stebbins, Cambridge). I use this textbook across two different undergraduate subjects, including a week on linguistics and careers.
Everything has been brought together in this set of slides I put together with Gretchen McCulloch. These slides are made available under a Creative Commons license so you can use and remix them for your own needs.
This slide set has been created as a resource for helping linguistics lecturers talk to students about using linguistics in their careers, and for linguistics students who are thinking about work.
These slides include four main sections:
An overview of linguistics and careers
An introduction to the Linguistics Jobs Interview Series
Activities to get students thinking about linguistics jobs
The Linguist Jobs Interview series ran from May 2015 to December 2022. There are over 80 interviews with people who studied
linguistics - be it a single undergraduate subject or a full PhD - and then gone on to careers outside of academia.
Although
I ask the same questions each time, I get very different answers. For
some people, linguistics is directly applicable to their daily work,
while others find that the general skills they learnt can transfer to
other careers.
In 2022 the linguistic job interviews were 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.
This is the full and final list of linguistic job interviews. There are over 80 interviews from an 8 year span. I’ll update this post with links to more resources I’m creating in 2023.
This month’s linguistics jobs interview is with Jeff Lilly, a Research Scientist at Cobalt Speech and Language. In this interview, Jeff shares how opportunities in computational linguistics have evolved since he received his degree, and how pursuing his interests in linguistics and computers have influenced his career.
You can find Jeff online on LinkedIn, or on either of his two blogs: druidjournal.net (on nature-centered spirituality) and axonfirings.com (on his fiction projects).
What did you study at university?
I have a BA in Linguistics from UNC-Chapel Hill (1995) and an MA in Linguistics from the University of Maryland, College Park (2000). UMD allowed me to qualify for the masters with two papers, so I did one paper on the lexical semantics of telic verbs and another on the typology of language games.
What is your job?
At Cobalt Speech and Language, it’s a small company, so lots of us wear many hats. I design dialogue systems, build natural language understanding models and applications, and perform testing and quality assurance. I’m also in charge of Cobalt’s ASR lexicons (the dictionaries we use for our speech systems).
How does your linguistics training help you in your job?
Linguistics is central to what I do, and I’m always trying to find new ways to incorporate linguistic knowledge into our tools. Most people working in speech technology come from a computer science background, so they’re unaware of the variety of linguistic theories that can be brought to bear on our work. Any speech technology model is a mix of raw data, effective architecture, and linguistic knowledge; the more of one you have, the less of the others you need. By contributing linguistic knowledge, I can make our models smaller and simpler, and make them faster and easier to train. For example, I built a syllabification module based on Optimality Theory that is critical to our text-to-speech software. It works for any language and never needs to be trained on new data.
What was the transition from university to work like for you?
As I worked on my master’s degree, I took as many computer science courses as I could handle. I got extra experience working with databases on the side. I was hired by a small search company shortly after I graduated (helping to build out the WordNet database), working primarily as a linguist, but my experience and classes in databases helped establish my abilities as a coder. When that company failed, I was able to join my next company as a research scientist / computational linguist, and I’ve been building my programming skill on the job ever since.
Do you have any advice you wish someone had given to you about linguistics/careers/university?
I guess one thing I had to learn the hard way is that the “real world” evaluates your performance much differently than school does. At school, you can just learn the material, turn in good papers, do well on the exams, and you’re golden. But oftentimes on the job, your managers don’t know you’re doing a good job unless you make yourself visible by speaking up in meetings, offering suggestions, volunteering for tasks, etc. It’s often better to try and fail than to keep your head down and play it safe.
Any other thoughts or comments?
When I started out as a linguistics undergrad in 1991, the profession of “computational linguist” barely existed. But I knew I loved linguistics and I was fascinated by computers, so I just tried to follow my passion, hoping that my enthusiasm and hard work would make up for any lack of ability or job prospects. It has not been a smooth ride – I’ve worked at almost a dozen companies in the past 20 years, been laid off more than once, had to move across the country multiple times, etc. But I’ve always gotten to work on fascinating projects with amazing people. For example, I was on the first tiny team to start building Alexa at Amazon in 2011. And I’ve continued to stretch and grow and learn in ways I’d never imagined. 20 years from now, building on the remarkable recent advances in language modeling, the field will be vastly different. I hope, for example, that there will be opportunities for computational linguists to peel back the layers of a system like GPT-3 and see how it has modeled human language. It’s going to be incredibly exciting.
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.
This month’s linguistics jobs interview is with Brent Woo, a Language Engineer for a voice assistant. Brent has an MA from Eastern Michigan University and a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Washington. In this interview, Brent describes how his career provides him with work-life balance and how his linguistics training ties into his work developing technology we use every day, but might not realize requires language data to run smoothly.
Linguistics and more linguistics! I entered undergrad not really knowing what I wanted to do. I took some finance and economics with the vague idea of becoming an accountant, but I didn’t have an interest in the material. I took some political science and cultural studies classes with some interest in “international affairs” but it still wasn’t quite right for me. I took an intro linguistics class and knew immediately this was it. This was the mix between analytical thinking and interesting human issues that I was looking for. I went on to finish BAs in Linguistics and Russian Studies, and then an MA and PhD in Linguistics.
What is your job?
Language Engineers work on the language designs for voice assistants. When you say something funny like “let’s raise the roof” and the voice assistant can interpret that to raise its volume to the maximum level, that was likely due to an LE language design. LE look into common variations on requests, understand the failures in human-machine communication, and adjust recognition coverage for them. We work on the scale of millions of utterances a day, so this process also has to be automated to some degree.
How does your linguistics training help you in your job?
I’m lucky to be considered a subject matter expert in language, and can usually make compelling arguments for utterance coverage based on language and human arguments alone. A common scenario is product or business stakeholders will request to have utterance X go to feature Y, and an LE will know from their expertise that no sane human customer would utter X to trigger Y. The LE has to present the case why that wouldn’t be a good design, and propose alternatives, and overall help the feature get better language coverage. This involves classic syntax for figuring out sentence structures and variations, and semantics for the annotation schema. Sometimes phonetics comes up when there are speech recognition conflicts or misfires!
What was the transition from university to work like for you?
Graduate school was great preparation for moving into this position. I already had experience running quantitative experiments and analyzing the results, managing different stakeholders (advisor, students, lab, external collaborators), and—most importantly—dealing with difficult customers.
Two things were new to me at the beginning: having conversations at the business and product level, and the pace of work. I wasn’t familiar how to navigate conversations about project budget and headcount, but I had a good friend as a mentor who helped me out with these early on. The pace of work differs from grad school: work comes and goes with the product release cycles, there are periods of crunch time and periods of relative calm and catch-up. Do you have any advice you wish someone had given to you about linguistics/careers/university?
If you’re interested in exploring a non-academic path, talk to linguists in those paths, watch the panels and webinars we’ve run on these topics, ask for mock interviews, and read Superlinguo! You’ll get a sense of what background you need and what projects you should be working on.
Any other thoughts or comments?
The most important thing for me when finding a job after graduate school was to find a work-life balance. While I’m happy and lucky to have an interesting job related to language, I was really thrilled to discover that it was very flexible and I can live a rich life outside of work responsibilities. There were other jobs that may have been a better fit, but were more demanding on my lifestyle or diplomatic capacity (for example, managing people). I have many colleagues at this and other companies who have taken on more intense positions and end up burning out or quitting due to the stress. I find the work-life balance in this position almost ideal and I am very happy.
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.
The Linguist Jobs Interview series has been running since May 2015. There are now over 60 interviews, with people who studied
linguistics - be it a single undergraduate subject or a full PhD - and then gone on to careers outside of academia.
Although
I ask the same questions each time, I get very different answers. For
some people, linguistics is directly applicable to their daily work,
while others find that the general skills they learnt can transfer to
other careers.
For newer interviews, you can browse the Linguistics Jobs tag on the blog!
The full list of Linguistics Job Interviews (to June 2022):
It’s been seven years of the Linguistics Job Interview series. There are now 75 interviews with people working in a wide range of jobs who all studied linguistics at some point.
Two changes have happened for the series in 2022.
The first change is that I’ve added a new question, taking the standard set from four to five. I now ask about the transition from university to work, because I found it was a bit of a gap in the story, and one that is perhaps the most mysterious to those just starting out on their career explorations. I’ve appreciated the honesty of people sharing their experiences, sometimes straightforward and sometimes more complicated.
The second change is that the the Linguistics Jobs Interview series is now 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. I’m a big fan of Martha’s work and it’s been so wonderful having her on the team to continue the series.
A lot of students come to university thinking they’ll study something that directly relates to the job they’ll end up with; teachers study teaching, software engineers study software engineering, psychologists study psychology. What is much more common, especially for linguistics students, is that you’ll end up with a job such as ‘Analyst’, a rather under-specified job title that requires the kinds of problem solving skills and structured thinking that studying things like linguistics trains you to do. Today’s interview is with Edward Wilford, who is a Senior Analyst for Arm, a company that specialises in the microprocessors and chips needed for modern gadgets.
What did you study at university?
I
have a BA in English Language and Linguistics from Durham, and an MPhil
in Linguistics from Cambridge. My thesis was an examination of the
syntax of the Breton auxiliary system, from a Minimalist perspective.
Undergraduate was very heavy in syntax and morphology as well.
What is your job?
I
work in market intelligence and forecasting, mostly corralling messy
data and finding ways to arrange it so that we can make sense of it. I
also do lots and lots of research into the microelectronics market, and a
fair amount of modelling/forecasting as well. How does your linguistics training help you in your job?
I
believe with all my heart that once you learn to analyse something, you
can apply that knowledge in almost infinite ways. I previously worked
as an analyst looking at niche financial products, and as a media
auditor, analysing how our clients spent their advertising budgets and
figuring the value they received. Knowing how to formulate questions, to
see patterns, to add and subtract layers of abstraction as needed, and
to rapidly reformulate when you hit a brick wall, all came from my
linguistic training.
What
was the transition from university to work like for you?
I
left knowing that a career in academia was not for me. But my first job
was literally writing a book on business; a large company had
discovered they had about a dozen different glossaries/dictionaries and
wanted someone with lexicographic experience to combine, expand and
harmonise all of them into a standard format, both to make them more
accurate and useful as a reference, but also to help in defining tasks
to automate. There were very linguistic-y questions to ask and answer,
such as ‘what exactly is a “delivery”?’ or an “attempted delivery”? Everything had to be fully spelled out and also entered into a paradigm.
In the compiling I had to write definitions for lots of different
business terms, and it was a tremendous crash course in the field.
Do you have any advice do you wish someone had given to you about linguistics/careers/university?
I
wish I had taken advantage of more of the ancillary training that was
offered, throughout my education. I had the chance to do an introduction
to statistical methods, and didn’t, because it wasn’t directly useful
in my work at the time. Training like that is always valuable. No one
regrets knowing about statistics. And I really wish I had taken
advantage of the BSL courses at Durham because I think everyone should
learn to sign.
Any other thoughts or comments?
I
have two small kids, and sometimes I feel like the true legacy of my
linguistic education is being incredibly relaxed about my own kids’
language acquisition. It’s a serious benefit.
Leaving graduate studies is usually not an easy decision. I appreciate that Brice Russ has taken the time to share with us how he weighed up the limitations of academic work/life balance and then took a thoughtful approach to volunteering and exploring alternative careers that reflect a range of his interests. Brice’s story includes many of the lessons that can be handy for your job search (internships, volunteering, LinkedIn good luck), but it also highlights something about modern jobs that isn’t always clear when you’re looking at jobs from the outside: many jobs involve working for a company that provides services to another company or business. Brice shares his experience of working for NASA while not actually being employed by NASA.
You can follow Brice on Twitter (@BriceRuss) or check out his website.
What did you study at university?
I studied sociolinguistics, particularly language variation on the Internet. My first grad school qualifying paper (at Ohio State) focused on using geotagged data from Twitter to map American English dialects—which was still a fairly new idea back in 2010, so it picked up a bit of press—and my second paper looked at how linguistic styles were perceived differently on Twitter vs. Facebook. I’d always known I was less than certain about following the academic career path, and I realized about halfway through my Ph.D. program that I was more interested in sharing cool studies with other people than actually doing the research myself. So I took a year-long leave of absence to pursue work in scientific communication, coming back for a semester in 2013 to write and defend my M.A.
My undergrad was at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where I majored in linguistics with a minor in English. I always liked to say that I majored in linguistics because it let me study everything—history, physics, psychology, etc.—but I was fortunate enough to have some fantastic professors, particularly Walt Wolfram (just down the road at NC State) and Connie Eble, who helped me fall in love with the field.
What is your job?
So right now, I’m a social media specialist for NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center; NASA has about ten centers across the nation (you’re probably familiar with Kennedy in Florida and the Johnson Space Center in Houston), and Marshall specializes in developing rocket technology and propulsion systems, among other areas. Like most NASA centers, Marshall’s workforce is split up between civil servants/government employees and contractors, and I’m in the latter group; I’m currently employed with Media Fusion as their Social Media Lead for our NASA contract.
Day-to-day, I create social content for Marshall’s Facebook and Twitter accounts, highlighting NASA news features and promoting events like rocket launches or the recent Perseid meteor shower. I track notable social engagements and social post metrics, and work with Marshall’s social media public affairs officer (on the civil servant side) to develop our overall social strategy and collaborate with other NASA centers. I’ve been working for home more or less continuously for the last 18 months, but in the Before Times, I’d be all around our center doing everything from taking photos of the POIC, “research central” for the International Space Station, to interviewing students on-camera for our Rover Challenge student competition.
By the time you read this, though, there’s a good chance I’ll be in a new role! I just accepted a position on NASA HQ’s digital team (on contract with MORI Associates) to help support social media across the agency, which I’m incredibly excited about.
How does your linguistics training help you in your job?
I think the biggest way my linguistics background has helped me in social/digital media is in reminding me that communication is a two-way street, even when you’re writing for a large organization or a major brand. Even small changes to your message can have a big impact on how they’re perceived, so when you’re putting together a tweet or a blog post or whichever, it’s important to keep your audience in mind and style your content accordingly. I’m also a bit of an analytics nerd, and my quantitative/statistics work in linguistics definitely helped me get more comfortable with data on a day-to-day basis. You’re probably not going to need an advanced stats background in most communications roles—I don’t think I’ve ever run an ANOVA test or anything like that at work—but having that general data literacy is a huge help for studying your social products, figuring out how to improve them, and making the case to the folks above you in the org chart.
What was the transition from university to work like for you?
Before I left academia, I’d been doing some volunteer work on the side to get some actual experience in science communication. I’ve been a life-long space fan and went to a handful of space advocacy conferences in undergrad (check out SEDS if this interests you!), so I started helping a couple of space non-profits, Yuri’s Night and the National Space Society, with their social accounts, web content, etc. Even so, it took me a good 10 months on the market to find my first full-time job in science communication—through a post on LinkedIn, of all things. After that, I was able to build my networks a bit, which helped me get my foot in the door for a couple of my future opportunities (like doing digital media for the Science news team), but landing that first job was definitely the hardest!
One of the main reasons I moved out of academia (aside from the depressing employment prospects) was that I personally found it very difficult to maintain work-life balance; there was always another paper to read, another set of quizzes to grade. Working in communications (especially social media) isn’t necessarily compatible with a predictable, 9-5 schedule, but I’ve definitely found it a lot easier to keep my free time to myself than I did in grad school.
Do you have any advice do you wish someone had given to you about linguistics/careers/university?
For NASA, specifically, I wish someone had told me to start looking for work with them earlier! I was aware in undergrad that NASA had a robust internship program, but I figured that all their internships were for engineers and scientists—when in fact, college students can pursue internships in public affairs, education/STEM outreach, and any other department that helps keep NASA running. I also wish I’d known that many (most?) jobs in NASA communications are with contractors, not just the civil service positions you see on USAJobs. Tracking those contractor positions down can be a lot harder sometimes, and they have their pros and cons, but if anyone’s thinking about a communications job with NASA and has any particular questions, feel free to shoot me an email.
Any other thoughts or comments?
Now is actually a really interesting time to get involved in digital media. Many organizations are moving past the mentality that they have a website, they have a Facebook page, and never the twain shall meet. Instead, they’re recognizing that there are a host of different platforms online, from email newsletters to messenger apps to news aggregators, that may or may not traditionally be classified as “social media” but are important to be aware of if you want to get your message out. There’s an emerging discipline, often referred to as “audience editing” or just “audience”, that harnesses this
viewpoint to help news outlets and similar groups build a holistic digital presence that listens to its readers—Bobby Blanchard, with the Texas Tribune, has a great slide deck highlighting how he does this in journalism. It’s been a tough decade for journalists and other publishers, naturally, so helping create strategies that get quality information out to the public (in my case, news on the benefits and promise of space exploration) can be really rewarding.
Your social media prowess is actually a job skill, you might just not know yet that those jobs are out there. Maggie is a Communications and Engagement Assistant at a disability peak body. Their work includes traditional and social media communications channels, and a need to think about who your audience is. You can follow them on Twitter (@vonbees) or Tumblr (@ritavonbees).
What did you study at university?
BA in Communications (Writing & Cultural Studies). I actually studied at a weird “technology” university and had to go through a totally different uni to do my linguistics electives. By the time I dealt with the forms and unit conversion and everything, I only had time for 101&102, which made me sad as I loved them! If I had been able to start in first year I might have changed my major.
What is your job?
Communications Assistant covers a really broad range of work! Like it says on the tin, you have to assist your organisation in whatever sort of communications it needs to do. Mine is a disability rights representative and advocacy nonprofit, so my job includes advertising, political campaigns and direct member communication. I am one of the people who tweets from our official account (including sometimes live-tweeting something like a public inquiry into systemic neglect or discrimination), updates our website, edits blog posts and media releases, creates flyers, surveys and infographics… I do a lot of “translating English to English” - explaining legalese, bureaucratic jargon and policy terminology in plain language. We need to be as accessible as possible, so aside from code-switching between Plain English and bureaucratese I do a lot of image descriptions and liaise with specialists to get really important content captioned or translated into Auslan, Easy English, etc. One of my colleagues is currently in charge of our fortnightly newsletter, but when I used to do it I would also record an audio version, sort of like a mini podcast, for members who didn’t have screenreader access (usually older folks who had trouble with technology).
How does your linguistics training help you in your job?
Semantics, pragmatics and a descriptivist approach to grammar are all relevant when trying to write about things like UN resolutions and discrimination legislation in plain English! (Sometimes I imagine turning a particularly stuffy government document into a series of tree diagrams, which is at least good for a laugh). Descriptivism also dovetails neatly with an anti-ableist approach to how other people speak and write, so it’s helpful to have linguistic references when pushing back against harmful ideas in that department.
Do you have any advice you wish someone had given to you about linguistics/careers/university?
Yes, I wish someone had convinced me not to half-ass it! See, I got into a really great creative writing course and then couldn’t attend the university that taught it for logistical reasons (would have been an interstate move). I tried to do the most similar degree I could find at a local uni, but it wasn’t a good compromise - it only had two writing classes each year and I was much less interested in the other parts of the course. I should have done a full pivot to something I liked in its own right, like linguistics, instead of stubbornly clinging to a shitty version of my number one choice. I guess the most useful advice without the benefit of hindsight would have been that a degree is a big commitment and it’s okay to take a gap year and give yourself more time to think about how you want to go about it. Oh, also if someone had told me I have ADHD that probably would have been helpful.
Any other thoughts or comments?
I’ve often thought about going back for some linguistics post-grad, but it would probably be for the love of learning - none of my plausible future career moves really need one. So I’m really glad people like you make linguistics knowledge more accessible to lingthusiasts outside academia! Clinically proven to reduce symptoms of FOMO xD
The Linguist Jobs Interview series has been running since 2015. There are now 61
interviews to date, with people who studied
linguistics - be it a single undergraduate subject or a full PhD - and then gone on to careers outside of academia.
Although
I ask the same questions each time, I get very different answers. For
some people, linguistics is directly applicable to their daily work,
while others find that the general skills they learnt can transfer to
other careers.
I update this list at least once a year. For newer interviews, you can browse the Linguistics Jobs tag on the blog!
The full list of Linguistics Job Interviews (to May 2021):
It’s been six years of Linguistics Job Interviews!
There are now 62 interviews across a range of industries and linguistic training backgrounds. I always love learning about the ways linguistics helps people in their work, and I’ll continue to post these interviews every month.
If you do a job that isn’t included in the list above, I’m always looking for people to interview (email: superlinguo æ gmail dot com).
This month’s interview is specifically about the field of law, and
how Marian found a niche within this larger industry that lets her
engage with language in a very real way. Even if you’re not interested in
law specifically, this provides a really nice illustration of the fact that there are
many fields of work that have a specific subset of jobs and careers
that might be more in line with your interests!
What did you study at university?
My
undergraduate degree was in Language and Linguistics from Queen’s
University (Canada). I took linguistics courses and also studied Japanese and
Mandarin Chinese. After undergrad, I went to law school at the
University of Victoria, then articled and was called to the bar in
British Columbia. I am now a legislative drafter, although my official job title is “Legislative Counsel”.
What is your job?
As
legislative counsel, I write and provide legal advice about
legislation. Ministries give instructions about their policy (eg. make a
new program to provide X, change the appeal process for Y, expand the
people eligible for this benefit), and I draft the bill, regulation or
order that will give effect to that policy. My job is to find the most
accurate, clearest, and most concise way of saying something. I also
have to consider the legal effect of what I’m writing. It’s challenging
but fun. Basically, I get to play with words and logic puzzles all day.
How does your linguistics training help you in your job?
I
think that my linguistics training probably helps me with clear
writing: a foundation in syntax helps me understand the different parts
of a legislative sentence and look out for potential ambiguity. But more
than anything, I think it’s the underlying love of language that drew
me to linguistics that makes legislative drafting such a good fit.
Do you have any advice that you wish someone had given to you about linguistics/careers/university?
My
advice would be to consider this career if you love linguistics and are
also in law. Although I also enjoyed litigation and solicitor work, I
wish I had known sooner that legislative drafting was a career option.
For someone who loves language and linguistics but then goes on to study
law, it’s an ideal combination. I remember having that “these are my
people!” feeling in my undergraduate linguistics program, and I have
that feeling again now.
Any other thoughts or comments?
If
you’re not planning on going into law but are drawn to the idea of
working with legislation, you could also go into legislative editing.
Legislative editors edit the regulations, bills and orders that we draft
- they can turn something mediocre into something great. If you love
language and have an eye for detail, you would probably enjoy
legislative editing.
As someone who has built language archives, and spent a lot of time poking around in archives built by other people, I appreciate the importance of well-structured meta-data. It’s good meta-data that tells you what is in the giant pile of data you’re working with, making the whole process much less of a needle-in-a-haystack scenario. Mallory Manley is doing the important work of managing data across multiple languages in the field of genealogy. I appreciate Mallory’s honesty about the challenges of stepping sideways out of linguistics, and sharing that experience with us in this interview. You can follow Mallory on Twitter (@ManleyMallory).
What did you study at university?
I
studied a Master of Arts in Linguistics at the University of Essex. My
favorite subject in linguistics is morphology, so I continue to study it
on my own.
What is your job?
I
work for a genealogy company as a cataloguer. I receive digital copies
of historical records and I organize them by place, record type (birth
certificates, census records, etc), and year to prepare them to be
published online. I am responsible for records coming from Scandinavia
and South Eastern Europe.
How does your linguistics training help you in your job?
When
I applied for this job, I had no working knowledge of the Scandinavian
languages or the languages of Eastern Europe, except for Russian. I
definitely oversold my abilities by stating in my cover letter that I
could learn any language. But knowing how to analyse language has helped
me learn these languages. And being able to identify patterns in
language helps me read those documents when I get stuck on words I don’t
know or simply can’t decipher. Learning the orthographies of each of
these languages has also proved to be a challenge, partly because
orthographies change over time, and partly because many of these
languages didn’t have a standardized orthography at all until relatively
recently. So even though I don’t use my linguistics training as much as
I hoped I would in a career, it has helped me succeed in this role.
Do you have any advice do you wish someone had given to you about linguistics/careers/university?
I
think when we’re young and planning for our future, we get specific
ideas about how our career path will look, and it becomes the only path
we envision. I had to learn to be flexible and accept changes. My first
year of college, I wanted to be a lexicographer (which I still think
would be an awesome job). I ended up instead building a career in
genealogy, and though it’s not where I expected or planned to be, it has
been fulfilling and joyful.
I’ve always been in awe of those people who knew in high school what vocational pathway they wanted to take. Having said that, I’m also quite pleased that a lot of universities here in Australia now encourage students to do broad degrees like Arts or Science at the Bachelor’s level before pursuing vocational degrees such as Medicine or Teaching at the Master’s level. Today’s interviewee, Ailsa Webb, has some good insights on the advantage of taking experience with linguistics into a postgraduate law degree. You can follow Ailsa’s final semester at university, and subsequent adventures on twitter (@WebbAilsa). For more on forensic linguistics, check out the En Clair podcast.
What did you study at university?
I studied a Bachelor of Arts majoring in Linguistics, with a minor in German. I also studied Latin and a little bit of Japanese.
What is your job?
I’m a full-time law student and am currently undertaking elective units to finish my degree. Last year I worked with my university’s Academic English support program. I also privately tutor VCE English Language (which is basically Linguistics 101 for Senior High School students in Victoria, Australia).
How does your linguistics training help you in your job?
My linguistics training is extraordinarily helpful in my degree, as the bulk of law is reading, writing and analysing language. I’m currently undertaking an elective that looks specifically at language issues in the law – it focuses on the linguistics features of legalese, how language is used in interviews and courtroom exchanges, and how this can cause misunderstanding, add to cognitive load, and exclude non-legal professionals and those from CALD (Culturally and Linguistically Diverse) backgrounds. I’m very interested to pursue future research in the field of forensic linguistics, and the combination of my study backgrounds means I am very well placed to look at these issues.
Do you have any advice you wish someone had given to you about linguistics/careers/university?
I chose Linguistics for my undergraduate simply because I loved it and was interested in it, and never had a ‘dream pathway into academia’ in mind. I’ve always considered myself interdisciplinary, and I wish students were more explicitly encouraged to combine different fields throughout their studies in recognition that this benefits those in both fields. The law in particular suffers from the silo effect to a fairly extreme degree, and non-legal professionals are not regarded as credible or valuable contributors to the field, which in my opinion is a mistake. I’d advise students to pursue their other interests – whether that’s science, information technology, law, education, sociology, whatever! – in the understanding that both areas will benefit from the transferable skills and knowledge.
The American Anthropological Association is a professional organisation for anthropologists, and promotes the field of anthropology. With over 9000 members, it runs a range of activities, publications and projects. Daniel Ginsberg works as the director of education and professional practice at the AAA - I’ll let him explain what that involves in more detail. I would like to highlight Daniel’s observation that social research design is something that you can take from academic research training and apply to a broad range of jobs. You can follow Daniel on twitter (@NemaVeze).
What did you study at university?
I’ve studied the intersection of language, culture and education for a long time, but from different disciplinary perspectives.
My undergraduate degree is in comparative literature because it was the
best way I knew at the time to study languages. I tried to also study
theoretical math at the same time, but I wasn’t able to complete all the
coursework for both. During my last year I
took intro to linguistics and I realized that was probably what I
should have done to begin with, but oh well, too late. I loved comp lit
and I have no regrets—it’s basically like linguistic anthropology except
that you use novels and plays instead of everyday
interaction.
I went on from there to get my MA in TESOL and worked for six years as a
language teacher, the last three teaching ESL at a public high school
in the United States, followed by a stint as a materials developer in
language assessment. That overlapped with me
going back to grad school for linguistics, and I was eventually able to
quit and work on my PhD full time. I had a concentration in
sociolinguistics, and my specific areas of interest were educational
linguistics, discourse analysis, ethnography and semiotics.
My thesis was on interaction in mathematics classrooms.
What is your job?
My fancy title is
director of education and professional practice. This means that I
do research on the profession of anthropology (including, but not
limited to, university professors of anthropology) and use those
findings to support our professional development and
public outreach programs. Here are a couple of things I’ve done
recently: develop interactive materials for a traveling exhibit on
migration and mobility; design, field and analyze a survey of journal
editors; facilitate a focus group of anthropology department
chairs about their pandemic crisis response; plan a remote internship
for two high school students who are interested to learn more about
anthropology.
How does your linguistics training help you in your job?
There
are a couple of specific ways that linguistics informs the way I do my
work. For example, while I was working on language assessment, I learned
to think of a test form as a speech
event that’s designed to have a certain perlocutionary effect, and the
same principle applies when I’m writing survey questions. A survey
response isn’t the unvarnished truth of someone’s soul, but a speech act
that they’re accomplishing in a certain social
setting, and any good analysis has to begin from there. Focus groups
are even better—I love to write focus group protocols in a way that will
elicit a lot of narrative from participants and use narrative analysis
methods to map the way participants conceptualize
their institutional / social / moral universe.
Do you have any advice do you wish someone had given to you about linguistics/careers/university?
This isn’t linguistics-specific, but it’s also good to have a general
idea of social research design. Like a lot of professionals, I work on
interdisciplinary teams a lot—I have colleagues with backgrounds in
business, publishing, communications, etc.—and one
thing I bring to those collaborations is that I understand how to think
about research beyond just “let’s send out a survey.” This is something
I’ve heard from applied social scientists in a lot of different
contexts of practice, from municipal government
to Silicon Valley.
Any other thoughts or comments?
I’m
currently working with a group of college students who are anthropology
majors, and I’m supervising them doing research about how their peers
and colleagues prepare for what comes
after graduation. One thing they noticed is that students who study
anthropology tend not to have a specific career goal in mind, but rather
they choose anthropology because it resonates with their values. They
have faith in the value of what they’re learning,
and faith that it’ll lead eventually to rewarding professional
employment. And when you talk to professionals about their careers, that
actually tends to be what happens. Your job title won’t be “linguist”
or “anthropologist,” but you’re doing linguistics
or anthropology because that’s who you are. I don’t mean this in a
corny, “just believe in yourself!” kind of way—it does take effort and
imagination—but if you can’t see the finish line now, that doesn’t mean
it isn’t there.
Many, many years ago I had a very boring office job. I would read Dinosaur Comics in my lunch break. My boss didn’t realise the conceit of the comic was that it was the same image with different text each time, and just thought it was my computer background… so I got to read a lot more Dinosaur Comics (and eventually I decided I needed a job with a bit more going on and went to grad school). Dinosaur Comics author and freelance writer Ryan North studied linguistics, and has a dog named Noam Chompsky (below, left). You can find out more about Ryan’s writing on his website, and follow him on Twitter @ryanqnorth.
What did you study at university?
In
undergrad I got a Bachelor’s of Computer Science, then did a Masters of
Science in Computational Linguistics. My focus was on light verb
constructions: things like “take a walk” or “give a smile”. We were
looking at computational ways to measure the acceptability of novel
constructions, so “take a stroll” would be fine, but “take a cavort”
wouldn’t score as much. After two years of work, we took the state of
the art from 60% precision and recall up to around 80%! [you can get a PDF of Ryan’s thesis]
What is your job?
I
do a lot of writing in comics: stuff for Marvel and DC (Squirrel Girl,
Kid Constantine), as well as nonfiction books (like How To Invent
Everything, a book about rebuilding civilization from scratch if you’re
ever trapped in the past).
How does your linguistics training help you in your job?
Linguistics
is such a broad field - covering the nature of thought, communication,
technology, human nature, and more. Having knowledge of these fields is
GREAT when writing: it’s like I got this huge cross-disciplinary
education even while I was just studying a single field. I couldn’t
have written a broad history of technology and civilization without that
introduction to some of the most exciting ideas in those fields, thanks
to linguistics. Also my computational linguistics training came in
very handy when I decided to make Squirrel Girl be studying computers at
college.
Do you have any advice you wish someone had given to you about linguistics/careers/university?
Take
every opportunity to move outside your own little circles. I know the
focus when you’re in school is getting good grades, but there’s all
sorts of optional stuff, tangential to your actual studies, that also
has terrific value. When you’re at college or university, you’re
embedded inside a community of diverse people, all of whom are obsessed
with one weird little corner of the world. That’s an amazing space to
be in! I always would ask my friends in different disciplines what the
coolest thing they’ve learned is, and it always led to really
fascinating conversations!
