What is your educational background?
Well, I went to college at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire and majored in anthropology there. I took a couple years off after graduating from college and worked in areas that I felt were related to what I wanted to continue with, and then I found that I needed to go back to grad school. So I went to Penn and got my masters degree in linguistics there, and then switched to Texas for my Ph.D.
What did you do during your two years off?
Yeah, that was in some ways the most interesting part of my life. The first year I worked in the Oneida Tribal School, which is a contract school run by the Oneida tribe in Indian Springs, Wis. It's trying to do innovative stuff with teaching the traditional Native American language to the heritage learners, the children in the community. So I worked there for a year, and then I took a very different type of job but also in applied anthropology. That was in Woodshole, at the marine biological lab, where I worked in an ecology subgroup. The topic was historical land use, and they needed to find out from an anthropologist how forests have been cut down in parts of the Third World, and they were interested in periods of times in the 1800s and 1900s, when there weren't a lot of historical records. They were interested in shifting agriculture and how it affected the residents.
How did you become interested in anthropology and linguistics?
That actually goes a long way back. My family moved to Vienna, Austria for a year when I was 13 years old, and I went to a Viennese school there. And I was impressed there by how immigrants -- what are called Gastarbeiter, the guest workers -- who had come from Yugoslavia to Vienna, how they were treated. One of my friends in my class was the son of a guest worker. And there were various interactions with the kids in my class that showed how language was used to mediate the relationship between the native Austrians and the guest worker populations from Yugoslavia.
The one thing that sticks in my mind, that I always tell about, is the time when I, as a foreigner learning German, was treated by one of my Austrian friends -- he spoke to me in this language that they reserved for speaking to guest workers. It was this broken form of German that was the way that Austrians spoke down to guest workers. By conflating my position as an American visitor who also didn't speak German perfectly, or natively, it had the very prejudiced and nasty undertones of the way he was pretending to speak to a guest worker. I was struck by the importance of language in culture and social relations. And the conjunction of that was when I returned, coming into a high school that was racially divided, in a suburb of Cleveland, and being very impressed by the similar kinds of relationships -- how different groups of people -- black, white -- distinguished themselves through language.
What is the most interesting thing you've done research on?
Well, I guess I'll talk about my current project, which is the most interesting thing right now. I'm looking at movies and how variation in language is used in order to characterize characters or comment on society -- and in particular whether ethnic or class dialects of English are used as part of the characterization.
What are the languages that you've studied?
Well, I've studied a lot of languages as a linguist. Linguists don't always speak these languages ... I speak German fairly well; I speak Hebrew fairly well, having been to those places. I studied Swahili for quite a while, in part having traveled to Kenya.
Can you get by [in Swahili]?
Not anymore. I did pretty well at the time, but that was 20 years ago. But yeah, I dabbled with other languages, like Navajo, some Native American languages.
As a linguist, do you have a requirement of a certain number of languages you're supposed to study?
No, that's what everyone always thinks but it's actually the reverse. First of all, the most prominent linguists in the last 20 years have worked on their own language, through study of their own intuitions. Chomsky, for instance, is the most important linguist in the last half-century, and he may well know other languages, but certainly if you follow his research, it is done on English, which is his own language. But yeah, it's the other way around -- people who are attracted to linguistics as a field are often people who got fascinated by learning language. And that was true for me too.
I think I pointed to these ethnic conflicts as what got me into the field, but frankly it was also this fascination with learning a new language, learning German in order to go to school in seventh grade. But also the seventh grade class was learning Latin. That was very new and exotic and different for me. It was also, you know, at a time when it was a real struggle to succeed in geography, or to succeed in playing with friends in a language that I was just learning. Latin was very fun for me as a class because everyone was starting out. So in a sense I came to this because I found that I just loved learning languages. So it is the other way around -- people study linguistics because they love learning languages. Linguistics itself, at least a modern substantiation of mainstream linguistics, is that you don't need anything other than your own language.
On another note, what are some hobbies of yours?
Well, my main hobby right now is my twin babies. I have one-year-old twins, and they take all of my time right now. I used to have a lot of hobbies. I'm an outdoorsman, so I love to hike, bicycle ... I actually did a lot of mountain climbing. Don't get much time for that anymore, but that's one of the things I love about living here. Whenever I get a free moment, I go out to Humpback Rock.
--Compiled by Hannah Woolf
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