Category: linguisitcs

Should you go to grad school for linguistics?

~ Rachael Tatman ~ 5 Comments

So I’ve had this talk, in different forms, with lots of different people over the last couple of years. Mainly undergrads thinking about applying to PhD programs in linguistics but, occasionally, people in industry thinking about going back to school as well. Every single one of these people was smart, cool, dedicated, hard-working, a great linguist and would have been an asset to the field. And when they asked me, a current linguistics graduate student, whether it was a good idea to go to grad school in linguistics, I gave them all the same answer:

The word no made from jigsaw puzzle pieces - Flickr horiavarlan
Nope.
“But Rachael,” you say, “you’re going to grad school in linguistics and having all sorts of fun. Why are you trying to keep me from doing the same thing?” Two big reasons.

The Job Market for Linguistics PhDs

What do you want to do when you get out of grad school? If you’re like most people, you’ll probably say you want to teach linguistics at the college or university level. What you should know is that this is an increasingly unsustainable career path.

In 1975, 30 percent of college faculty were part-time. By 2011, 51 percent of college faculty were part-time, and another 19 percent were non–tenure track, full-time employees. In other words, 70 percent were contingent faculty, a broad classification that includes all non–tenure track faculty (NTTF), whether they work full-time or part-time.

More Than Half of College Faculty Are Adjuncts: Should You Care? by Dan Edmonds.

And most of these part-time faculty, or adjuncts, are very poorly paid. This survey from 2015 found that 62% of adjuncts made less than $20,000 a year. This is even more upsetting you consider that you need a PhD and scholarly publications to even be considered for one of these posts.

(“But what about being paid for your research publications?” you ask. “Surely you can make a few bucks by publishing in those insanely expensive academic journals.” While I understand where you’re coming from–in almost any other professional publishing context it’s completely normal to be paid for your writing–authors of academic papers are not paid. Nor are the reviewers. Furthermore, authors are often charged fees by the publishers. One journal I was recently  looking at charges $2,900 per article, which  is about three times the funding my department gives us for research over our entire degree. Not a scam journal, either–an actual reputable venue for scholarly publication.)

Yes, there are still tenure-track positions available in linguistics, but they are by far the minority. What’s more, even including adjunct positions, there are still fewer academic posts than graduating linguists with PhDs. It’s been that way for a while, too, so even for a not-so-great adjunct position you’ll be facing stiff competition. Is it impossible to find a good academic post in linguistics? No. Are the odds in your (or my, or any other current grad student’s) favor? Also no. But don’t take it from me. In Surviving Linguistics: A Guide for Graduate Students (which I would highly recommend) Monica Macaulay says:

[It] is common knowledge that we are graduating more PhDs than there are faculty positions available, resulting in certain disappointment for many… graduates. The solution is to think creatively about job opportunities and keep your options open.

As Dr. Macaulay goes on to outline, there are jobs for linguists outside academia. Check out the LSA’s Linguistics Beyond Academia special interest group or the Linguists Outside Academia mailing list. There are lots of things you can do with a linguistics degree, from data science to forensic linguistics.

That said, there are degrees that will better prepare you for a career than a PhD in theoretical linguistics. A master’s degree in Speech Language Pathology (SLP) or Computational Linguistics or Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) will prepare you for those careers far better than a general PhD.

Even if you’re 100% dead set on teaching post-secondary students, you should look around and see what linguists are doing outside of universities. Sure, you might win the job-lottery, but at least some of your students probably won’t, and you’ll want to make sure they can find well-paying, fulfilling work.

Grad School is Grueling

Yes, grad school can absolutely be fun. On a good day, I enjoy it tremendously. But it’s also work. (And don’t give me any nonsense about it not being real work because you do it sitting down. I’ve had jobs that required hard physical and/or emotional labor, and grad school is exhausting.) I feel like I probably have a slightly better than average work/life balance–partly thanks to my fellowship, which means I have limited teaching duties and don’t need a second job any more–and I’m still actively trying to get better about stopping work when I’m tired. I fail, and end up all tearful and exhausted, about once a week.

It’s also emotionally draining. Depression runs absolutely rampant among grad students. This 2015 report from Berkeley, for example, found that over two thirds of PhD students in the arts and sciences were depressed. The main reason? Point number one above–the stark realities of the job market. It can be absolutely gutting to see a colleague do everything right, from research to teaching, and end up not having any opportunity to do the job they’ve been preparing for. Especially since you know the same lays in wait for you.

And “doing everything right” is pretty Herculean in and of itself. You have to have very strong personal motivation to finish a PhD. Sure, your committee is there to provide oversight and you have drop-dead due dates. But those deadlines are often very far away and, depending on your committee, you may have a lot of independence. That means motivating yourself to work steadily while manage several ongoing projects in parallel (you’re publishing papers in addition to writing your dissertation, right?) and not working yourself to exhaustion in the process. Basically you’re going to need a big old double helping of executive functioning.

And oh by the way, to be competitive in the job market you’ll also need to demonstrate you can teach and perform service for your school/discipline. Add in time to sleep, eat, get at least a little exercise and take breaks (none of which are optional!) and you’ve got a very full plate indeed. Some absolutely iron-willed people even manage all of this while having/raising kids and I have nothing but respect for them.

Main take-away

Whether inside or outside of academia, it’s true that a PhD does tend to correlate with higher salary–although the boost isn’t as much as you’d get from a related professional degree. BUT in order to get that higher salary you’ll need to give up some of your most productive years. My spouse (who also  has a bachelors in linguistics) got a master’s degree,  found a good job,  got promoted and has cultivated a professional social network in the time it’s taken me just to get to the point of starting my dissertation.The opportunity cost of spending five more years (at a minimum–I’ve heard of people who took more than a decade to finish) in school, probably in your twenties, is very, very high. And my spouse can leave work at work, come home on weekends and just chill. This month I’ve got four full weekends of either conferences or outreach. Even worse, no matter how hard I try to stamp it out, I’ve got a tiny little voice in my head that’s very quietly screaming “you should be working” literally all the time.

I’m being absolutely real right now: going to grad school for linguistics is a bad investment of your time and labor. I knew that going in–heck, I knew that before I even applied–and I still went in. Why? Because I decided that, for me, it was a worthwhile trade-off. I really like doing research. I really like being part of the scientific community. Grad school is hard, yes, but overall I’m enjoying myself. And even if I don’t end up being able to find a job in academia (although I’m still hopeful and still plugging away at it) I really, truly believe that the research I’m doing now is valuable and interesting and, in some small way, helping the world. What can I say? I’m a nerdy idealist.

But this is 100% a personal decision. It’s up to you as an individual to decide whether the costs are worth it to you. Maybe you’ll decide, as I have, that they are. But maybe you won’t. And to make that decision you really do need to know what those costs are. I hope I’ve helped to begin making them clear. 

One final thought: Not going to grad school doesn’t mean you’re not smart. In fact, considering everything I’ve discussed above, it probably means you are.

The problem with the grammar police

~ Rachael Tatman ~ 1 Comment

I’ll admit it: I used to be a die-hard grammar corrector. I practically stalked around conversations with a red pen, ready to jump out and shout “gotcha!” if someone ended a sentence with a preposition or split an infinitive or said “irregardless”. But I’ve done a lot of learning and growing since then and, looking back, I’m kind of ashamed. The truth is, when I used to correct people’s grammar, I wasn’t trying to help them. I was trying to make myself look like a language authority, but in doing so I was actually hurting people. Ironically, I only realized this after years of specialized training to become an actual authority on language.

Chicago police officer on segway
I’ll let you go with a warning this time, but if I catch you using “less” for “fewer” again, I’ll have to give you a ticket.

But what do I mean when I say I was hurting people? Well, like some other types of policing, the grammar police don’t target everyone equally. For example, there has been a lot of criticism of Rihanna’s language use in her new single “Work” being thrown around recently. But that fact is that her language is perfectly fine. She’s just using Jamaican Patois, which most American English speakers aren’t familiar with. People claiming that the language use in “Work” is wrong is sort of similar to American English speakers complaining that Nederhop group ChildsPlay’s language use is wrong. It’s not wrong at all, it’s just different.

And there’s the problem. The fact is that grammar policing isn’t targeting speech errors, it’s targeting differences that are, for many people, perfectly fine. And, overwhelmingly, the people who make “errors” are marginalized in other ways. Here are some examples to show you what I mean:

  • Misusing “ironic”: A lot of the lists of “common grammar errors” you see will include a lot of words where the “correct” use is actually less common then other ways the word is used. Take “ironic”. In general use it can mean surprising or remarkable. If you’re a literary theorist, however, irony has a specific technical meaning–and if you’re not a literary theorist you’re going to need to take a course on it to really get what irony’s about. The only people, then, who are going to use this word “correctly” will be those who are highly educated. And, let’s be real, you know what someone means when they say ironic and isn’t that the point?
  • Overusing words like “just”: This error is apparently so egregious that there’s an e-mail plug-in, targeted mainly at women, to help avoid it. However, as other linguists have pointed out, not only is there limited evidence that women say “just” more than men, but even if there were a difference why would the assumption be that women were overusing “just”? Couldn’t it be that men aren’t using it enough?
  • Double negatives: Also called negative concord, this “error” happens when multiple negatives are used in a sentence, as in, “There isn’t nothing wrong with my language.” This particular construction is perfectly natural and correct in a lot of dialects of American English, including African American English and Southern English, not to mention the standard in some other languages, including French.

In each of these cases, the “error” in question is one that’s produced more by certain groups of people. And those groups of people–less educated individuals, women, African Americans–face disadvantages in other aspects of their life too. This isn’t a mistake or coincidence. When we talk about certain ways of talking, we’re talking about certain types of people. And almost always we’re talking about people who already have the deck stacked against them.

Think about this: why don’t American English speakers point out whenever the Queen of England says things differently? For instance, she often fails to produce the “r” sound in words like “father”, which is definitely not standardized American English. But we don’t talk about how the Queen is “talking lazy” or “dropping letters” like we do about, for instance,  “th” being produced as “d” in African American English. They’re both perfectly regular, logical language varieties that differ from standardized American English…but only one group gets flack for it.

Now I’m not arguing that language errors don’t exist, since they clearly do. If you’ve ever accidentally said a spoonerism or suffered from a tip of the tongue moment then you know what it feel like when your language system breaks down for a second. But here’s a fundamental truth of linguistics: barring a condition like aphasia, a native speaker of a language uses their language correctly. And I think it’s important for us all to examine exactly why it is that we’ve been led to believe otherwise…and who it is that we’re being told is wrong.

 

Do sign languages use the feet?

~ Rachael Tatman ~ 2 Comments

So one of the things that a lot of people who aren’t familiar with sign languages tend to find surprising is that there’s a lot more involved than just the hands. In fact (as I think I’ve mentioned before), fluent signers actually focus on the eyes of the person they’re signing with — not the hands at all. That makes it easier to see things like grammatical facial expressions. But it the use of other body parts doesn’t stop there. In fact, I was recently surprised to learn that several sign languages around the world actually make use of the feet during signing! (If you’d asked me even a couple of months ago, I’d have guessed there weren’t any, and I was super wrong.)

Dancers' feet

Signs Produced on the Feet

So one way in which the feet are used during signing is that some signs are produced with the hands, but on top of or in contact with the feet. Signers aren’t usually bending down to touch their toes in the middle of signing, though. Usually these are languages that are mainly used while sitting cross-legged on the ground. As a result, the feet are easily within the signing space.

Signs Produced With the Feet!

Now these are even more exciting for me. Some languages actually use the feet as active articulators. This was very surprising to me. Why? Well, like I said before, most signers tend to look at other signers’ eyes while they’re communicating. If you’re using your feet during signing, though, your communication partner will need to break eye contact, look down at your feet, and then look all the way back up to your face again. That may not sound like a whole lot of work, but imagine if you were reading this passage and every so often there was a word written on your knee instead of the screen. It would be pretty annoying, and languages tend not to do things that are annoying to their users (because language users stop doing it!).

  • Some sign languages that produce signs with the feet:
    • Walpiri Sign Language (Australia): Signs like RUN and WALK in this language actually involve moving the feet as if running or walking.
    • Central Taurus Sign Language (Turkey): Color signs are produced by using the toe to point to appropriately colored parts of richly colored carpets. (Thanks to Rabia Ergin for the info!)
    • Highland Mayan Sign Language/Meemul Tziij (Guatamala): Signers in this language not only use their feet, but they will actually reach down to the feet while standing. (Which is really interesting–I’d love to see more data on this language.)

So, yes, multiple sign languages do make use of the feet as both places of articulation and active articulators. Interestingly, it seems to be predominantly village sign languages–that is, sign languages used by both deaf and hearing members in small communities with a high incidence of deafness. I don’t know of any Deaf community sign languages–which are used primarily by culturally Deaf individuals who are part of a larger, non-signing society–that make use of the feet. I’d be very interested to hear if anyone knows of any!