Just A Phrase I'm Going Through

My Life in Language

David Crystal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134011865
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Social Sciences

Kidnapping, attempted assassination, espionage … not the answers you'd expect to the question 'what happens when you become a linguist?'

But now, reflecting on a long and hugely successful career at the forefront of the field of English Language and Linguistics, David Crystal answers this question and offers us a special look behind the scenes at the adventures, rewards, challenges and pitfalls of his life in language.

Both an autobiography and a highly accessible introduction to the field of linguistics, Just a Phrase I'm Going Through illuminates and entertains us with its many insights into the ever-fascinating subject of language.

David Crystal is synonymous with language, both as a great populariser and linguistic pioneer, and his contribution to the field is unparalleled. This is a book not just for students and teachers but for all lovers of language.

For more about David Crystal at Routledge, visit: www.routledge.com/textbooks/9780415485746.

Chapter 1
Being a linguist

How, indeed? How did I get to be a linguist, a linguistics person, a linguistician, a language geek? How does anybody? And what does ‘being a linguist’ mean, anyway? There’s a problem here. The biographical bit will have to wait a chapter. Bear with me, while I go on about my subject for a bit.

It’s not as if it’s the most obvious label for a way of earning a living, after all. Indeed, it’s a succulent irony that the very name of the profession which has come to be known as ‘the science of language’ is itself ambiguous.

‘What do you do?’

‘I’m a linguist.’

‘Ah. And how many languages do you speak?’

‘Do you mean really fluently?’

‘Of course.’

‘Just one.’

‘But you said you were a linguist!’

So I am, I am, but not in that sense. I would love to be fluent in many languages. As it happens, I can ‘get by’ in a number, but there’s a world of difference between ‘getting by’ and ‘being fluent’. Ordering a gin and tonic, or asking the way, is one thing. Carrying on a proper conversation about the local political scene is very much another. It’s the vocabulary that’s the killer. Getting a grasp of the basic grammar of a language, and learning to pronounce the sounds accurately, need not take too long. But vocabulary is the Everest of language. Memorizing the tens of thousands of words you need in order to hold your own in long conversations on variegated topics takes time, lots of it, and – unless you happen to have been brought up bilingual – a level of motivation and opportunity which is usually missing in Britain for all but a very lucky or very gifted few. How the multi-tongued record-holders of the past managed it is beyond me. Take the great Harold Williams, who died in 1928. He was a journalist – the foreign editor of The Times – said to have spoken fifty-eight languages fluently. He was apparently able to talk to all the delegates attending the League of Nations in their own language. Nobody else came anywhere near him. Fifty-eight languages! I wonder he ever managed to do anything else.

Being a linguist, in my sense of the word, evidently doesn’t mean that you’ve managed to learn lots of foreign languages. But it does mean that you’re interested in them. All 6,000 or so of them. All languages that have ever been or ever could be. No, ‘interested’ is too mild. When you dip your toe into linguistics, you end up being enthralled, captivated, obsessed by languages. Because they are all around you (increasingly so, in an escalatingly multicultural world), their sounds, words, and sentences keep thrusting themselves on to your attention. You are surrounded by an ever-playing linguistic orchestra. You cannot avoid listening, analysing, reflecting, comparing, contrasting, making notes. You delight in the diversity of the very sound of language. The pleasure must compare with that of a botanist in a garden full of the brightest flowers. Or of a bibliophile surrounded by antiquarian bookshops in a heaven like Hay-on-Wye. Except that you don’t have to travel so far to enjoy the diversity of language. You just have to walk down the street, or go into a shop. You don’t even have to leave home. On television every day there are more accents and dialects than Horatio would ever have dreamed of in his philosophy, and they are all calling out, ‘I am interesting. Study me.’

And so you do. If you’re a linguist. That’s what linguists, in my sense, do. They revel in the variety of local accents and dialects. They are fascinated by the phenomenon of daily language change. They bathe happily in a warm sea of foreign tongues, and the more esoteric the better. They explore the upper orifices of the body to work out their phonetic capabilities. They marvel, along with everyone else, at the self-assuredness of the language-learning child, then try to understand how on earth such ability emerges so quickly, and what has gone wrong when it doesn’t. They puzzle over how language must be represented in the brain. They try to work out what all languages have in common, to capture the essential identity within the very notion of ‘language’. They speculate about the linguistic past, along with historians and archaeologists, and ruminate – especially after a glass or two – over how languages must have originated. After a third glass, they can develop opinions about what might be going on in the way non-human animals communicate, or even extraterrestrials. They do not lack experience in such matters. Linguists were brought in to advise on the alien speech-forms in Star Wars. And arising out of Star Trek, there is a grammar and dictionary of Klingon.

There are certain quotations which all linguists use to show that they are literate human beings – most of them from Lewis Carroll. An instance comes to mind now. In Through the Looking Glass (Chapter 6), Alice meets one of the most hard-boiled linguists ever, who points out that there are 364 days of the year when people might get un-birthday presents.

‘Certainly,’ said Alice.

‘And only one for birthday presents you know. There’s glory for you!’

‘I don’t know what you mean by “glory”,’ Alice said.

Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. ‘Of course you don’t – till I tell you. It means “there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!”’

‘But “glory” doesn’t mean “a nice knock-down argument”,’ Alice objected.

‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.’

‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make a word mean so many different things.’

‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master – that’s all.’

Master of Words. It sounds like a degree. And Humpty certainly claims to have his MW. As he goes on to say:

‘They’ve a temper, some of them – particularly verbs: they’re the proudest – adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs – however, I can manage the whole lot of them!’

Managing the whole lot of them. That’s linguistics for you. And of course, not forgetting to tell the rest of the world what you discover when you become a word-manager. Because the things you find out are not just fascinating. They are also immensely useful to others.

But more of that later. What became plain to me, very early on in my close encounter with linguistics, is that being a wordmaster alters your behaviour, in the way you deal with words, sounds, and languages. To begin with, you discover you’re not scared of them. And you find yourself going out of your way to try things out – enquiring about the time, when you don’t really want to know, just to see if your pronunciation is intelligible, or if a sentence construction works. It’s an indescribable thrill when you try out something in a new language for the first time, with foreigners who don’t know you from Adam (or Eve), and realize that your freshly cooked mix of novel sounds does actually work as a tool of communication! There’s also a different kind of thrill, when your interest takes you over and you end up the focus of attention. I went to a phonetics talk once, in which the speaker was discussing whether or not it’s possible to make a sound by trilling the epiglottis (that’s the flap which covers the wind-pipe when you’re swallowing). Reflecting on the point, I tried it out repeatedly on a London underground station platform. I stopped when it dawned on me that everybody was avoiding eye contact, and nobody was standing near me any more.

You also find yourself asking people questions about the way they use language – such as what their name means, or why their house is so called, or where their accent comes from. You don’t plan it. The questions just sort of pop out. A woman telephoned me once about a new deal for car insurance, and asked to speak to my wife, who wasn’t in. I took the message, and asked who it was from. She said her name was Aniela such-and-such. It came across as ‘ann – ye – la’. ‘You’ll have to spell that,’ I said, which she readily did. I’d never heard the name before. I know I should have just said thankyou, and put the phone down. But linguists aren’t made that way. ‘That’s an interesting name,’ I remarked, adding – in case she thought it was a new kind of come-on – ‘I study names.’ Twenty minutes later, we ended the conversation, the car still uninsured, but both of us more knowledgeable.

Why twenty minutes? Five minutes to establish that she didn’t know what Aniela meant, though she thought it was from her grandmother’s side of the family, and she came from Poland, and she hoped one day to visit there, and so on and so on. Another five thumbing through various books on the origin of first names, with her holding on, until, yes, there it is, eventually finding it in Patrick Hanks and Flavia Hodges’ excellent Dictionary of First Names. Of Polish origin, indeed – the Polish form of Angela, ‘occasionally used in the English-speaking world’. I felt honoured: I had now met one of the occasions. But Aniela wanted to know more. What did Angela mean? Did it have anything to do with angels? That one I knew. Angel goes back to Greek angelos, which meant a messenger, I told her. She was delighted. She’d been a messenger in her first job, you see, and she thought this was highly significant. Then she wanted to know what her best friend’s name meant, and her boss had an interesting name too … As I say, twenty minutes before she remembered there were other things in life than etymology, and that she’d better get on with them. She went back to insurance sales. I went back to – well, etymology, as it happens.

It’s often like that. Conversations tend to grow unchecked, when the topic turns to language. I think it’s because everyone has an interest in it. Everyone has a name, an accent, a favourite word, a pet linguistic hate. Everyone has a linguistic history, and thus a story to tell. When it comes to language, everyone’s equal. Everyone’s an expert. And, to be sure, everyone is, having spent much of the first five years of life learning how to talk, and (for those lucky enough to get to school) much of the next five learning how to read. You don’t have to have special qualifications or go in for special training in order to sound off about your language or to play a word-game show, like those where you have to fill the blank in a sentence. You don’t even have to phone a friend. You just have to use your own linguistic intuition. You want to hate a word? Invent a new one? Fill a blank? Just do it. Go on. ‘Spick and——’? ‘They were green with——’? You already know the answers (if you speak English). The associations are there, deep within your brain. You just need to bring them to the surface, and (if you happen to be on TV at the time) without panicking.

Most people enjoy my interest, when they’re on the receiving end of language questions. And I enjoy theirs. A few tell me to mind my own business (which of course, if I take the observation literally, is what I am doing anyway). But most end up asking questions in return, and are pleased to learn that there are books or websites which can answer many of them. I sometimes think I should be asking for commission for acting as an unofficial publisher’s rep. Mind you, conversations can be dangerous things, if you’re a linguist. It’s a danger which can affect anyone, but linguists are especially prone. Accommodation is lying in wait to get them.

Now, I appreciate that what I’ve just said looks like one of those weird sentences linguists sometimes dream up to make a Linguistic Point. (I’ll be talking about another one later – Chomsky’s ‘Colourless green ideas sleep furiously’.) But it does make sense. By ‘accommodation’ I do not mean the place where you live. This is accommodation in the sense of ‘adaptation’ – a notion that was discovered by sociolinguists, a species of colourful linguist that formerly flourished well only in the shade, but is now regularly encountered in new cultivars in sunnier and more prominent positions. I think it was one of the great linguistic discoveries of the twentieth century.

Sociolinguists study what happens to language when it is put to use in society. And one of the things they noticed was that, when people talk to each other, something happens to the language they use. Imagine: I meet you, and we start talking. If we hit it off, and we start to enjoy one another’s company, then one of the ways in which we unconsciously display this rapport is that our accents start to move towards each other. I begin to sound a bit like you, and you a bit like me. We ‘accommodate’ to each other. (If we don’t hit it off, of course, then the opposite applies. I try to make myself sound as different from you as I can, and you from me.) It’s not just accents. We start to share words, too, maybe bits of grammar. We even start looking a little like each other, adopting the same sort of facial expression or body posture. But accent is always the most noticeable thing, because it’s there in everything we say. Everybody accommodates, to some extent, even if they don’t realize they’re doing it. It must be part of our evolutionary make-up, a way of showing a group who belongs to it. Some people, though – perhaps those with a good ear for accents, perhaps those with a specially sensitive personality – do it more noticeably than others. That’s when it can get dangerous, and linguists are at risk more than most.

Linguists are professional accommodators, phonetic chameleons. My wife tells me that she can always tell who I’m talking to at the other end of the phone – or, at least, which part of the world they’re from – by the accent I slip into. I accommodate within a few seconds, and (unless I remember to stop myself) totally. I have long learned to lie with the consequences. That is not a typo. I mean ‘lie’, not ‘live’. I remember meeting a Scot at an arts conference a few years ago. He had a strong Glasgow accent. We were both involved in community arts centres, and in the meeting we both seemed to be in agreement about what needed to be done, if such centres were to survive in a world where successive British governments were rating the arts as a funding priority several levels below what was being allocated for waste disposal. We start to talk. Within seconds, I can sense my vowels turning into Billy Connolly. And I know it’s only a matter of time until he asks the jugular question. Sure enough, he begins to stare at me:

‘Are you from Glasgow?’

I now face a dilemma. Either I lie and say ‘yes’, in which case he a...

Table of contents

• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of panels
• Prologue
• Chapter 1 Being a linguist
• Chapter 2 A semilingual start
• Chapter 3 New worlds
• Chapter 4 Liverpool school
• Chapter 5 Extra-curricular acts
• Chapter 6 Learning, and not learning, about language
• Chapter 7 Becoming academic
• Chapter 8 Surveying
• Chapter 9 Worlds within worlds
• Chapter 10 Becoming professional
• Chapter 11 The sexy subject
• Chapter 12 Meeting needs
• Chapter 13 Choices and consequences
• Chapter 14 Meetings and meetings
• Chapter 15 Looking for remedies
• Chapter 16 Why did you resign?
• Chapter 17 The encyclopedia game
• Chapter 18 Schizoid man
• Chapter 19 Busyness and business
• Epilogue
• Index