Linguist of the Day

Jeff Heath - University of Michigan

Many of you who donate to Fund Drive do so in order to support the student crew, thereby contributing to the future of linguistics. Without your donations, we, the LINGUIST graduate students, probably would not have had the chance to meet and interact with the linguists who will ultimately influence our lives and careers. This year, as a special treat for our subscribers, each of us on the LINGUIST graduate crew has asked a linguist who has been influential in our lives to share with us how they first became interested in linguistics. Please join us as we take a “cruise” down memory lane.

I tagged along with my parents at the age of 10 for a semester on the then-unspoiled Mediterranean coast of Spain. Your memory of an experience like that can imbue a foreign language (in your mind) with all sorts of exotic associations (rolling your r = beaches, subjunctive = seafood, etc.). I then had a good experience with high school language courses (Spanish and French). There were other subjects that I enjoyed in high school and had an aptitude in initially, but either my grades rolled off the table in senior year (math) or my interest waned (literature--I could never find the Christ symbols), so there was a process of elimination. I enrolled as a Linguistics major in my first week as a college freshman. The major was very small (4-5 students per graduating class), the teaching and advising were very good, and I never looked back. The other thing was that my old man was a high school English teacher. When you are the child of an English teacher, you are going to have your grammar corrected on a daily basis from about the age of six. ("Bill and me are going downtown." "Bill and WHO?") Now I correct HIS grammar. Maybe that was the real reason I became a linguist--a Hamletesque mix of filial emulation and revenge.

I have studied and done fieldwork on many languages. At first the choices were accidental: taking Arabic instead of Chinese in college because I had nocturnal roommates and couldn't get up at 9 AM; encountering a Choctaw in New Hampshire and being invited to visit his community; getting a phone call out of the blue with a 3-year post-doc fellowship opportunity in Australia). After finishing up my Australian publications, I worked on several overlapping projects in Maghrebi Arabic, and since 1990 my fieldwork has been in northern Mali, working systematically from north (=Sahara desert) to south (Sahel), one language at a time. I prefer working on languages, and in regions, that other linguists haven't touched. My old man was also a baseball coach, and (as a spray hitter with no power) I learned early on to "hit 'em where they ain't."