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For as long as she can remember, Colleen White ’11 has enjoyed language for its own sake — to the point where, as a young girl, she was hooked by a seemingly innocuous phrase in the classic Laura Ingalls Wilder book Little House on the Prairie. ‘Gordo’ or ‘Gordie’: What’s in a Nickname:
Linguistics major Coley Labun describes herself as an “avid sports fan,” especially college hockey. While doing research on “speech communities” in society — professions or distinct groups that have a specialized jargon — she found an article about the linguistics of nicknames for professional hockey and baseball players, and knew she had a topic for a project.
Labun set out to see if college hockey players’ nicknames taken from their surnames are created at random or can be predicted linguistically. She surveyed more than 60 players in the US and Canada who fit the description — a last name of “Gordon,” for instance, and a nickname of “Gordo” or “Gordie.”
“The linguistic features of the last name decided which suffix or suffixes could be added,” she explains. “Some names could have multiple nicknames, and others could only have one. In each case they could either truncate part of the name and add a suffix or leave the name as is and attach a suffix.”
She expressed her findings this way:
•Adding no suffix [“Griffith” --> “Griff”]
•Adding “o” [“Ord” --> “Ordo”]
•Adding “s” [“Klein” --> “Kleins”]
•Adding “er” [“Price” --> “Pricer”]
•Adding “i” or “ie” [“Brooks” --> “Brooksie”]
Using this approach, Labun was able to create charts to predict the nicknames of college hockey players. “Essentially, it showed that the hockey world is a huge speech community,” she says. “I was very excited by how the project turned out. I was able to take my love for hockey and apply it to my schoolwork. It showed me that my academics can apply on so many other levels of my life — and even pertains to my sports obsession.”.
“There’s one part where Pa scolds Laura for saying ‘I love this’ — he tells her that you should only use ‘love’ for people, not things,” recalls White, a native of Elk River, Minn. “I thought it was interesting: Why should that word be all right for one, but not the other? Does it really make a difference?”
She didn’t know it at the time, but White was preparing for her future area of study in college, and in all likelihood, her career.
White is one of 13 Boston College seniors who will receive bachelor’s degrees in linguistics this year, an unprecedented number in University history, according to faculty from the Slavic and Eastern Languages Department, which offers the program.
“No matter whom I talk to, or what the situation is, linguistics seems to come up,” says White, who is serving an internship at a translation company. “There’s always something you can contribute to the conversation.”
Linguistics might have had a reputation as an intensely specialized, even arcane field, but the truth is quite different, say faculty and students. It’s a discipline that BC grads have found useful in any number of professions: teaching, speech pathology, government service, law, management consulting — and, in at least one case, the fashion industry.
“The best way to think of linguistics is like taking a watch apart,” says department chair Associate Professor Michael Connolly. “What makes language work? There are so many facets to that question: cultural, historical, cognitive, philosophical, as well as scientific. So linguistics is not sitting in front of a computer or a tape recorder doing analysis. It involves practically the whole spectrum of the humanities.”
“Studying linguistics means you are always prepared to engage another human being, because everyone is interested — on some level or another — in the way we communicate,” says Catherine Hadshi, a senior from Frederick, Md., who has used insights from her linguistics courses in studying literature, teaching second languages, analyzing history and considering aspects of psychology and neuroscience.
“I have never met a person who doesn't have an opinion on accents, language acquisition, social uses of language, word games — the list goes on. Part of the attraction of linguistics is that language is so quintessentially human, so that in studying language, you begin to unlock truths about humanity.”
The linguistics program at BC encompasses central courses — Syntax and Semantics, Language in Society and Historical Linguistics, for instance — and classes in philology, including Old Irish, Classical Armenian and Christian Latin. A third branch of the program is “topics courses,” such as Language and Ethnicity, Linguistics and Communication, Linguistic Analysis and Field Methods, and Second-Language Acquisition.
“We cover a good chunk of the field,” says Professor of Slavic and Eastern Languages Margaret Thomas, who cites several factors for the growth in linguistics she and Connolly have noted. She credits in particular the increased “internationalization” of BC students, especially their greater interest in studying abroad and learning languages such as Arabic or Chinese. Studying another language, she explains, “presents an opportunity to study language itself” — and undergraduates can find that a challenging yet satisfying prospect.
For example, in Linguistic Field Methods, one exercise directs students to construct the grammar of Vietnamese — including syntax and semantics — through non-translated interviews with native speakers.
“It was difficult but rewarding,” says senior Bridget Germain. “One of the coolest projects I’ve ever done at BC.”
Rebecca Edwards, whose senior thesis compares the development of Arabic dialects with the proliferation of Romance languages from Latin, says: “Here I'm taking a look at a culture that I literally knew nothing about before starting to write the initial paper. I love that with my background in linguistics, I'm able to study languages and cultures that I really did not understand before, and come out of it with a solid understanding of it all.”
But linguistics also is critical to exploring the use of language beyond routine interpersonal communication. Alicia Johnson ’11, whose interests lie in the intersection of language with gender, geography, ethnicity, sexual orientation and other social factors, and who envisions a career working in health policy and advocacy, is writing her thesis on language in the abortion debate.
“Language is so vital to advocacy in studying how people think about issues like abortion and how organizations, politicians, and individuals talk about ‘choice,’ ‘life’ and other important concepts.”
Senior Coley Labun, meanwhile, pursued an intriguing project: finding out whether college hockey players’ nicknames that are derived from their surnames are created at random or can be predicted linguistically. She surveyed more than 60 players from the US and Canada and analyzed the linguistic features of their last names and how these related to the suffixes used to fashion a nickname.
Thomas says the need for persons with an acute insight into the subtleties of language is a never-ending one, even in what would seem unlikely settings. One BC linguistics grad, she says, wound up being hired by a cosmetics firm because it needed somebody who, among other things, could help gauge the effectiveness of product names and campaigns.
“As new kinds of media and vehicles of communication emerge, it is more important than ever to be aware of how we express ideas and concepts, consciously or unconsciously,” she says. “Linguistics is more relevant than it has ever been.” “Linguistic study is good for the brain,” says senior Sarah Boyle. “It helps us challenge our assumptions about everyday life and our knowledge of things that are second nature to us.”