I’m a linguist. I study Language. I know what that means, but whenever I meet someone new and they ask what I do, the answer “I’m a historical linguist” almost always gets the same response: “Oh...okay...” Hell, I come from a family of mathematicians, engineers, and doctors, so I’m pretty sure even they don’t really know what I’m doing with my life. So what do I mean when I say, “I’m a linguist”? More importantly what don’t I mean?

For starters, I most certainly do not sit at my computer posting on news stories and status updates about how awful it is when people type “their” when they really mean “they’re” or how “irregardless” is most certainly a sign that people just don’t have any respect for the English language anymore. In fact, I’d put money down that the people who get the most worked up about those things are the least likely to be linguists. Typos happen, just like you don’t always speak perfectly. We stutter, have false starts, use the wrong word, mispronounce things, and so on in our native language, which some of us have been speaking for quite a long time. “Irregardless” was first attested in writing in the early 1920s, which means it was presumably in use for some time before that. So if your argument is that it’s bad English because the word should be regardless and irregardless is some new bastardization of the word, well guess what? It’s older than you, and it’s older than a lot of other words that we use every day. And last I checked, English isn’t on fire.

I don’t care about commas. Allow me to let you in on a little secret: comma errors are not grammatical errors. Saying “We drove by that house blue yesterday” is a grammatical error. I’d wager you even felt it when you read that sentence. At their most vital, commas serve to distinguish between multiple readings of a string of text, one or more of which is presumably not intended, maybe even ungrammatical, but not necessarily. Take the Oxford comma (that comma right before “and” in a list of three or more things). A while back I saw this on several of my friends’ Facebook pages:

It’s kind of clever, and I chuckled. But when it comes right down to it, if someone sends you an email with the sentence “I had eggs, toast and orange juice” in it, is there any possible way you would actually assume the second interpretation? Or perhaps that this person believes you yourself to be toast and orange juice and is addressing you directly? If you said yes, I have news for you. You might be an idiot. Likewise, when someone uses irregardless in a sentence, you might cringe at the sound of it because you know it’s just not “correct”, but do you not know what they meant by it?

So what does a linguist do? Well, asking that question is sort of like asking what a doctor does, or an engineer. You’re likely to get as many different answers as linguists you ask. There are some who study how children acquire language(s), some who travel the world documenting languages that are in danger of dying out, and some who study how our brains handle non-native languages differently than our native tongue. There are computational linguists working on a systematic way to get a computer to understand the difference between “to cure cancer” and “to cure ham”. It seems simple enough on the surface, until you try to teach a machine to do it. Others study Phonology. We’re probably all pretty familiar with the phenomenon of monophthongization in Southern English—the way some southerners say something a little closer to Standard English “far” when they say the word “fire”—though I bet none of us call it that; but did you know that not all southerners do this the same way? In fact, you can tell roughly where someone is from based on the words that exhibit this trait. The list goes on and on. These areas also all overlap with one another, so God help you if you ever get the long answer to “what do you do?”

So what do I do? Well here’s the only slightly long answer. I’m a historical linguist, that is to say, I study the way Language changes over time. More specifically I study Germanic languages (English, Dutch, German, Middle High German, Old Norse, Old Saxon, etc.). My studies tend to be a little bit of this and a little bit of that. Part of what I do is look at the literary traditions of some of these languages. After all, there are only so many people out there taking the time to learn Old Saxon, so it would be a waste to do so and not be able to tell you what a fascinating piece of literature the Hêliand is and why. Sometimes I study the way word meaning changes over time. Did you know there actually used to be (and there still is for some speakers of British English) a distinction in meaning between will and shall? Will was used to describe definite events while shall was for predictions. Once that distinction was lost in American English, one of the two simply took over, and now we only use shall in very restricted contexts.

I also look at the way sounds have changed over the centuries and between languages. Why is it “laugh” and not “laff”? How come the English word tide sounds so much like the German Zeit (‘time’)? Indeed, why do so many German words look and sound similar to English ones? More surprisingly, why do we also see remarkably systematic similarities between such seemingly disparate languages as English, Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Irish, Armenian, Manx, Danish, Russian, Kurdish, Punjabi, Persian and Pashto just to name a few? It wasn’t until the late eighteenth century that scholars really began to notice just how many of us are connected through language. Sir William Jones in 1786 famously wrote of the relationship between some western European languages and Sanskrit:

The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source...”

That is to say, at some point in the far-flung past, all of these languages, which we today call the Indo-European languages, were just one language. And if all of these languages are connected, what does that say about the people who speak them (ignoring for a moment the complications of a postcolonial global society)? Kumbayah, dudes. We’re all, like, brothers and sisters, man. Let’s all sit around, listen to some tunes and all talk about how we all talk. You see, that’s it. That’s what linguists are really all about. If we could roll language up and smoke it we would. If you could freebase it, we’d be dead in a week. I’m not upset at all if you say disinterested when you mean uninterested or if you pronounce the words bed and bet the same way; but I am fascinated by the why. Why is Language the way it is? Where has it been? Where is it going? What does it say about us as individuals, groups and societies? Like all things worth studying, the deeper you delve into the material, the more questions you find. And in the end that’s really at the heart of what I do. I look for new questions and hope to find answers to some of the old ones along the way.

P.S. Fun fact: Kumbayah is Gullah, a Creole language spoken on the coast of my home state, South Carolina (Also GA and parts of FL). It, like many creoles, traces its genesis back to a period of great cruelty, human suffering and indignity, in this case slavery. But after the Civil War there were islands off the coast where land ownership was as high as 95% black. These tight knit communities helped preserve the language, which unfortunately is often seen, even at times by its own speakers, as “just bad English”. I myself always thought the song was a little silly growing up. What the heck is kumbayah and why are we so sure God wants to hear it so bad? It means ‘come by here’. If that "bad English" were lost to us, we'd not know that. That's one of the reasons any good linguist will tell you that there is no bad English, or bad language of any sort, at least not in that sense, only different.