I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve been asked, “Linguistics, huh? How many languages do you speak?”. There certainly was a time in my life when I wanted to be a polyglot; I wanted to learn every language I possibly could, starting with French or Spanish and moving to Russian, Gaelic, or Arabic. I’ve since abandoned that endeavor because linguistics lets me study languages without having to learn them all. Of course, learning a language confers an advantage in your study of that language, but you don’t have to.

So how did I end up in linguistics? When I was in the third grade, I quickly became an avid francophile. If I so much as overheard someone talking about Paris, baguettes, and berets, I was all ears (yes, I now know that these are stereotypical of French culture). This obsession went so far that in the sixth grade one of my projects was making a trivia board game called “Quest of France!” I took French classes in high school, even taught my peers in the lower level classes. By that time it was settled for me: I was going to be a French teacher, the coolest one ever. So I went to university, declaring my “Language studies in French” major at UC San Diego. I thought I would be taking French art, history, and literature courses and otherwise becoming a sophisticated young lady who speaks French. I did have to take some literature courses, but as it turns out I also had to take a Ling101 course as part of my major’s core classes. I quite literally ended up in linguistics, not knowing what to expect.

My instructor was a graduate student, a redheaded Texan lady who told us about some of the cool ways they use English in Texas. As soon as we learned the International Phonetic Alphabet and starting doing transcriptions, I was hooked. We did an exercise to help us native speakers realize the sounds we make unconsciously: Put your hand out a few inches in front of your mouth and say “pit” and “spit”, then “kit” and “skit”. In the words without the “s” at the beginning, there’s this puff of air you feel – that’s aspiration. In some languages it makes a difference in meaning whether you have an aspirated or non-aspirated consonant. In English, it’s something that just happens as a side-effect of the p, t, or k being at the beginning of a stressed syllable.

A few weeks into that class, I switched my major to Linguistics. I took the basics: phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax. Then things got super interesting: psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics. I kept taking French classes and eventually added a French literature minor. I spent a year abroad in France and studied linguistics while I was there, solidifying my knowledge of and about the language.

I’m currently pursuing my M.A. in general linguistics at San Diego State University. My primary interests are sociolinguistics and accent perception. Language was my childhood sweetheart — I can’t see myself in any other field, not with so many questions waiting to be answered. Sure I still want to learn lots of languages, but if I can understand more about human language, then I will understand more about humanity. We’re all human, and language is an invention that rates up there with fire and the wheel.