Before I became an academic, I did other things for ten years - all kinds of jobs. The thread through it all was languages. I sold metal in French to Belgians for three years in Birmingham (I can discuss tube specifications in French if you really need me to, or shipping costs!).
I worked for a charity, and for the Civil Service in immigration, doing translations and interpreting. I was using my languages in all these jobs. I then trained to teach English as a foreign language overseas, and worked as a teacher in Yemen. I'm now a Professor of Linguistics, teaching and researching phonetics and phonology.
Intonational Variation in Arabic materials
I got into linguistics originally because I wanted to run a training session on pronunciation for people learning Arabic. I wanted to look up the patterns of pronunciation in Arabic - there were books about English pronunciation, but basically none for Arabic! So, I thought I’d like to write one of those books. I remember being so excited when I had this idea that I couldn’t sleep! Now, essentially, that’s what I’m doing: I’m writing the book on Arabic intonation patterns that I discovered back then didn’t exist.
My research is the first in the world to share open-access comparable speech data in eight different Arabic dialects. It will be a useful resource for learners, but can also be used to train automated speech systems.
Our students start out with the core areas of linguistics. The sound system: phonology and phonetics, and the internal structure of words and sentences (like the skeleton of the language): syntax. In semantics, we look at how the meaning of a sentence ends up being more than the sum of its parts.
One of the things that people don’t realise about linguistics is that we’re really a social science. We do statistics and coding, and learn to think like language nerds, but - alongside this scientific approach - because it is language, we're dealing with something messy and human and social, so linguistics makes you an all-rounder.
I’m a phonologist, which means that alongside phonetics - measuring acoustics and describing the articulation with your tongue and your lips - I’m really interested in how things work in the brain, and what that system looks like in different languages.
You’d think that across the world’s languages, if there were 6,000+ languages, then there might be 6,000+ ways of being a language - but there aren’t. I'm finding the same patterns in Yorkshire that I find in dialects of Arabic. There is always a much smaller set of ways of doing things, and the study of 'how many ways there are of being a language' is what we call typology.
We’re a big, diverse community, so there’s a lot going on. On the languages side, all our language teaching is done in the target languages. So, if you’re learning about the culture and politics and history of France, it will be in French - and indeed not only of France, but of Canada, French-speaking Africa and the Caribbean. It's global.
On the linguistics side, you can be an all-rounder, or start to specialise as you go through the degree. There's lots of choice, and you can find your own way through it. I think for our students, that’s a real advantage: they can discover what kind of linguist they are, and then just be that kind.
