[Speaker is Suzanne Evans Wagner, assistant professor in the Department of Linguistics and Germanic, Slavic, Asian and African Languages.]
Wagner: I’m an assistant professor in the linguistics department, and linguistics is, if you like, the science of language. It’s the study of how language is structured in the mind, and since we can’t see into the mind or the brain, at least only in a very limited way, we have to work from what people actually say. I like to record people speaking, and in particular, I try and interview them rather like you’re interviewing me, and I ask them lots of questions about themselves, and I try to get them to relax so that they no longer think about what they’re saying and they’re not worried about how they’re saying it. This particular kind of very unselfconscious speech is a great window into how their language is structured. So, what I specifically look for when I’m interviewing people, when I’m analyzing their speech afterwards, is variation in their language where the goal of understanding why ultimately and how language changes over time. We know that language changes. We know that French used to be Latin for example. But, we want to understand how that process happens.
Sometimes, you need hours and hours and hours of speech data that has taken you even more hours to collect before you can really find all the things that you’re interested in. Sometimes I’m interested in a single vowel; I’m interested in a particular vowel. There are Ph.D.s in my field who have written their dissertations on the vowel, “ah”. So if you’re listening out for every instance of “ah” in someone’s speech that takes a long time to count and analyze and measure. So I think perhaps time is one of the things I find challenging in this job.
Well, you can tell, I’m originally from England. I grew up in southeast England, not too far from London. I guess I grew up in a place where there were some strong contrasts in accents. My accent isn’t very representative of where I grew up. Because I grew up close to the east side of London, the East End, there are lots of people there who have an Eliza Doolittle accent, a Cockney accent. So there was a really strong contrast between the way I spoke and the way lots of my friends spoke, and I think that made me really aware early on that this was an interesting subject. How did it come about that I sounded different from other people, or how does it come about that anybody sounds different from anyone else?
Obviously, I enjoy the theory of my job. I enjoy trying to understand the language change that I was telling you about, but I really enjoy interacting with my subjects, and I really enjoy interacting with students. That’s why I’m in this game.
[Produced by Brian Vernellis. Media Communications. University Relations. Michigan State University.]