There’s a question that’s been doing the rounds recently: ‘what are arts and humanities degrees good for?’ Well, try living in a world that doesn’t have them; a world that doesn’t have people asking the kinds of questions we ask. Try and do anything without language, whether you’re listening, speaking, engaging or convincing. It’s almost impossible — and that’s why linguistics matters so much.
I’ve always been interested in language. I’m half-Dutch, half-Scottish: I was brought up in the Netherlands before I moved over to Scotland at the age of 12. Language has always been a big part of my life, and I’m interested in how it works. People are fascinated with language, and specifically accents, dialects and identities; everybody has a story to tell about a time someone didn’t understand them, or when they used a word that seemed alien to everyone else. That’s what makes my own area of teaching and research so fun!
When you move somewhere new — Nottingham in my case, back in 2005 — the first thing you do as a linguist is find out who’s written about the region. In the case of the East Midlands, there was very little existing research, and that surprised me. The dialect here is so curious, a peculiar mix of northern and southern features, and people in research tests have placed the East Midlands accent as far south as Plymouth and as far north as Carlisle. So since coming here, I’ve been looking at language variations in the East Midlands. A lot of my work is focused on coal miners and their communities — so-called ‘pit talk’, and the heritage assets of language and lived experience that stand to be lost forever unless we can preserve them amongst younger generations.
You can encounter a kind of rigidity — that prescriptive sense of right and wrong — in language. I always start my module by asking ‘who here has an accent?’, and a few people will put their hands up. But in truth, everybody does; some people just don’t realise it because where they come from, other people sound like they do. Others might think that the way they speak isn’t ‘proper’. But it’s not a question of correct or incorrect when it comes to language, and we’re not prescribing how people should speak — rather, we’re exploring how they actually do speak. Questions of right and wrong are irrelevant; we’re more fundamentally interested in how people use language, and for what purposes, and so we really encourage our students to think about all the things they’ve taken for granted. Is the news always correct? Are newspapers always unbiased? We want them to question these things — why a politician uses the word ‘migrant’ instead of ‘refugee’, for example, or ‘could’ instead of ‘must’. We want our students to become independent, and to question things for themselves. We want them to investigate and interrogate, and to become (in their words) ‘language geeks’.
As a researcher, I also want students to understand that they can be researchers themselves. Sometimes, they can arrive from school as quite passive learners, waiting to be told what to read, do and answer, or what’s likely to be in an exam. But university’s different. We encourage our students to conduct their own independent research and discuss things with each other, and that’s why it’s important that we’re so research-active as academics. When a student sees a paper or a book written by one of us, it not only reinforces the fact that they’re being supported by real experts in the field — it helps them to visualise their own success as academics.
Ultimately, university’s about more than just studying. It’s about connectivity and a sense of belonging. Our students engage with us as people, not just teachers, and that makes me happy and proud. We’ve built a very supportive community here, and we have a shared understanding that success doesn’t always come easily. Even for us, as academics and researchers — students might see us publishing a book or an important paper, but what they don’t see is the nine different drafts, or us eating our body weight in chocolate, or the tears and tantrums when it’s not going right, or the four people who’ve had to proof-read it. We don’t just sit down and say ‘today, I’m going to write a book’: we go through the exact same process as our students when they’re writing their essays and dissertations.
We encounter the same challenges, and that’s something I want them to really understand — because if they can see that honesty in us, it helps them to develop the thick (or even thicker) skin they’ll need to succeed in a really competitive field.
