How Linguistics Got Her Groove Back¹

Gunnr Guðr Entgegenlächeln
FG Klopstock Universiteit

Common wisdom—an oxymoron if ever there was one—has it that linguistics and linguists themselves have a bit of a reputation problem. Are linguists boring? Incomprehensible? Pointless? Evil? The contention of this paper is—given that perception is nine-tenths of reality—unless we ask, we’ll never know.

To that end, I conducted a survey, which took place at a cocktail party, where there were many linguists and many non-linguists who were not particularly well-acquainted with linguistics. I interviewed 3 (±0.15) non-linguist partygoers: JWD, a mathematician, JWM, an artist, and WMJ, a biochemist.

I asked them to rate each of the following types of people on a desirability scale from 1 to 10, where 10 is “the mostest awesomest thing evar!” and 2 is “a root canal” (preserving 1 for some unnamed personal horror, as is standard practice):

person—a random unknown person at a cocktail party

linguist—an unknown person at a cocktail party who, when asked, “What do you do?”, replies, “I’m a linguist.”

π—a previously identified linguist who, when asked, “How many languages do you speak?”, replies, “About 3.14159265.”

diseases—a previously identified linguist who, when asked, “How many languages do you speak?”, replies, “That’s like asking a doctor how many diseases they have.”

rocks—a previously identified linguist who, when asked, “How many languages do you speak?”, replies, “That’s like asking a geologist how many rocks they have in their head.”

water—a previously identified linguist who, when confronted with the comment. “Linguistics? Is that even a thing? I mean, I speak a language, how much can there be to know?” responds with, “Would you assume that a fish knows everything there is to know about water?”

air—a previously identified linguist who, when confronted with the comment. “Linguistics? Is that even a thing? I mean, I speak a language, how much can there be to know?” responds with, “Does the fact that you breathe air mean you know everything about atmospheric science?”

The raw data is provided below. Responses for each respondent are listed columnarly in the column under their initials. Additional computed fields include:

μ—the mean of the respondents, by row

σ—the standard deviation of the respondents, by row

Δ—the difference of the row mean from the row mean for “linguist”

ϙ—a heuristic “reliability score” predicting how predictive the row mean for each row means to be:

ϙ =	|(μμ - μ) * Δ| σ

where μ_μ is, naturally, the mean of the row means.

After completing the first round of survey questions, I detected the need for an additional category of linguist, already included in the data summary above:

survey—an unknown person at a cocktail party who, when asked, “What do you do?”, replies, “I’m a linguist. Could I get you take a quick linguistic survey for me?”

There are a few caveats that need to accompany the data above. Due to the small sample size, I did not control for the use of singular they in the survey questions. Also, there appears to be an unexpected but likely sample bias from gathering survey data at the most recent International Men of Philology/Women of Anthropology Multidisciplinary Mixer.

Nonetheless, we can draw some useful, practical conclusions:

• In terms of improving the perception of an individual linguist, the π and rocks approaches are the most unreliable, but could play well with the proper audience.

• That dreadful diseases joke works better than one with good taste would expect.

• Taking surveys at cocktail parties is not a good way to improve the perception and reputation of our field or ourselves—that must be why syntacticians only ask themselves and their indentured-servant grad students for data.

Well, now we know!

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