ELAP Alumni

Former MA student: Alice Mitchell

Alice Mitchell with the Buffalo buffalo.

My B.A. was in German and Linguistics, and when living abroad in eastern Germany as part of the degree, I was amazed to discover that two Slavic minority languages were still spoken in the area, completely unbeknown to many Germans. I wrote my B.A. thesis on factors involved in the disappearance of the Sorbian languages, and applied for the ELAP M.A. in Language Documentation and Description to find out more about language endangerment and what linguists were doing about it.

The M.A., which I took in 2009-10, offered a taster of the many different directions linguists can take from the basic recognition that the world’s linguistic landscape is rapidly changing. While the loss of linguistic diversity is lamentable, I realised that an activist role was not for me. Instead, I wanted to understand the social contexts of language change and learn how to document and describe languages in their social setting. I decided I would need a more complete knowledge of linguistics to pursue these goals and applied to several graduate schools in the U.S., where I felt I could get a broad and in-depth training in linguistics.

I’m now in my second year of the Linguistics Ph.D. program at the University at Buffalo, taking classes, teaching, and monitoring the quality of my British accent. The decision to embark on a long Ph.D. program in the U.S. has been extremely fulfilling so far; I’ve learned a lot about the different fields of linguistics and have had time to focus my own interests. I’m currently planning a field trip to Tanzania this summer, where I hope to begin researching an avoidance register in the Barabaig dialect of Datooga. This register is a special kind of language used by women to avoid saying the names of their in-laws, and is as yet unstudied. Special registers of this kind are endangered across the African continent, and they offer an interesting insight into how political, socio-cultural and economic changes are affecting local language practices. I’m looking forward to trying out some of the documentation methods I learned at SOAS and finally beginning to contribute to our knowledge of under-described languages.