When I was a kid it didn’t take long to learn that growing up in Kansas we said things a little differently locally than how they talked on the TV. Then after we moved across the country to Idaho I started to notice they talked different than we did and the folks on the TV. After a while I became fascinated with the differences in the way various Americans from around the country used the English language.
The first time I heard the word Linguistics was in middle school. It was one of the electives my school offered when I was in the 8th grade so I took it. Okay I was partially motivated cuz a girl I had a crush on was in the class but still, I was fascinated by the topic. In that class we mostly just learned a few simple phrases in a half dozen languages and them compared them to get an understanding of how different languages work.
We learned the same phrases in German, Italian, Spanish, French and Japanese. We learned how to say “hi, my name is” “what is your name” “where is the bathroom” “I would like bread and chicken please” and we learned the different words for the colors and numbers. This was far from enough to learn anything meaningful or practically useful in any of these languages but it was still a fun class that I rather enjoyed. For reasons I don’t wanna get into here I never completed the class but I enjoyed it while it lasted.
From there the closest I got to anything lingustics related was taking a semester of Spanish in high school and taking a few advanced English and Literature classes along the way along with Creative Writing and Poetry. Most of this gave me a much greater understanding of how English works along with some history of the language itself but not much beyond that.
By the time I got to college, at the age of 28, things had changed. I was required to take a foreign language class so I chose Japanese. It was the only one that appealed to me. I also hoped, in vain, that if I got good enough I could use that to play some Japanese exclusive video games I had missed out on. It didn’t work out so well but I had a lot of fun learning what I did, even though I have long since forgotten nearly every single thing I learned at the time.
Then I finally got to take a proper college level Linguistics class. I loved everything about it. We spent most of our time learning the DNA of English but we also learned a lot about the tudy of linguistics as afield. While at the time my Major was Broadcasting (an option dropped from the university the next year but I was locked in) and my minor was shall we say rotating every other semester. This was around the time I began considering locking in and going for a full Linguistics option. My school didn’t offer a dedicated Linguistics degree of any sort but my advisor suggested switching my Major to English with a Teaching Emphasis and a Minor in English Literature to maximize the English language options the school had to offer. Her logic was combined with taking additional language classes for electives would give me the best chance of getting into the field of Linguistics post college and that I could fall back on teaching if that didn’t work out. It was a solid plan so I went for it.
I ended up taking some pretty hefty nerdy language related classes that ultimate didn’t serve me beyond establishing a $5 vocabulary I haven’t found useful in every day conversations. If I had followed that path instead of where I ended up I think my life could have turned out differently. However due to a few bad decisions I can’t discuss here right now my time at the univeristy was cut short and I had to move on. Still I love learnimg about the origins of words, the relationship various languages have to one another and using those $5 college words when I get the chance. Lately I have been contemplating looking into giving going into teaching another go but things have been slow going so far.