Whenever I meet someone new when I go out, I am inevitably asked the question "What do you do?" I've never cared for the question, really. It doesn't seem fair to ask someone to sum up their life in a few words. But people expect a brief answer, so I say, "I'm a student," because that is what I do -- I study. Naturally, this leads to the question "What do you study?"
"Linguistics," I reply. The facial expressions of reaction are always different whenever I say this. Most of the time people don't know what this is. If they are familiar with it, they will most likely make some sort of reference to Chomsky. True, Chomsky is one of the pioneers of modern linguistic theory, but since I don't really study syntax I don't get into Chomsky that much. Indeed, his political commentary is personally more interesting, but that is another matter.
But if people aren't familiar with the field of linguistics, the painfully inevitable next question is "What's that?"
Now this is a difficult question to answer because most people expect a simple explanation. I usually just go for some Wikipediaesque answer like "Well, it's the science of language," but this really does the field a great injustice. Indeed, the subject of linguistics is so vast and covers such a wide range of fields of study that it would take me about half an hour to summarize all the aspects of the science. As a linguistics student, I am ashamed by my gross oversimplification, but I don't want to bore people. They want to know about me, not some obscure, fetishist science.
So, after explaining what I study in a brief fashion, the next question I usually get is naturally, "Oh, how many languages do you speak?"
This association that people form between linguistics and polylingualism perplexes me. Why does everyone assume that linguists are polyglots? Most are not. Sure, most linguists can speak more than one language, but a good deal don't. In fact, it's more likely that a professor of linguistics may be familiar with the grammars of dozens of languages, but be completely incapable of speaking them. Multilingualism is more the line of work of translators and interpreters than linguists. Of course, that's not to say that being able to speak several languages is not important for being a linguist -- because it is -- but linguistics in no way equals polylingualism.
So of course, I have to say, "Almost one," which is true. I could say that my Turkish is pretty good, but it does no good to boast. This response is usually met with an anticlimactic "Oh."
After this comes the linguistic anecdotes -- the observations about accents (especially between Americans and Britons), personal assessments of linguistic competence, Chomsky, geographic linguistic questions, grammatical questions, etc. Lately, I've noticed that these are always the same. In fact, every time someone asks me what I do the conversation that ensues is a near replica of the last one I had the last time someone asked me that question. And while I'm out just trying to have a drink and enjoy myself, I get sucked into talking about the same topics, again and again. Not that I don't like chatting about linguistic stuff; I do, but more interesting stuff. Like how Japanese speakers will hear epenthetic vowels that aren't there. Or how speakers will alter their speech to accommodate who they are talking to. Or how the formants in proficient bilinguals' L1 vowels will resemble those of the L2 over time. Why can't that stuff come up in conversation?
Regardless, I'll have to find something else to talk about soon, because as of yesterday I'm not really a student anymore -- term time has ended, and the rest of my time as a "student" will be spent writing my thesis. And with all the work that lies ahead of me, when I do take a break and go out for a social night I probably won't want to talk about linguistics!
