If you've ever met a linguist (and I think most of my readers have met me) you don't need to worry about whether or not you're pronouncing words right or being grammatically correct or whatever. It's not our business to pass judgement on others for the way they speak. More likely, if you say something in an unusual or nonstandard way, the linguist will be thinking, "Wow! That's fascinating! I wonder how I can explain this deviation." I know I'm certainly not perfect. As I write this blog entry, little squiggly lines keep drawing my attention to the spelling mistakes I make as I type.
Also, I speak one language fluently. I'm glad that the one language I speak fluently is used globally and is the language I'm most interested in. If I suddenly found myself in Mexico City or Moscow I could get by though. In the case of Moscow, I would probably know just enough to get back to the US Embassy. Maybe if I wasn't studying linguistics, if I wasn't so well aware of how much more there is to Spanish and Russian, I would inflate my language abilities a bit more. "What languages have you studied?" will get you a better answer from a linguist than "What languages do you know?"
Sometimes linguists are like language spies. This has to do with what I was describing in the first paragraph. When people find out they're talking to a linguist they get self conscious and don't talk as they normally would. Therefore, linguists sometimes have to be sneaky. There is a variety of ways in which linguists have tricked people into talking naturally, for research purposes. I'm not going to reveal them to you, just in case.
Also, I speak one language fluently. I'm glad that the one language I speak fluently is used globally and is the language I'm most interested in. If I suddenly found myself in Mexico City or Moscow I could get by though. In the case of Moscow, I would probably know just enough to get back to the US Embassy. Maybe if I wasn't studying linguistics, if I wasn't so well aware of how much more there is to Spanish and Russian, I would inflate my language abilities a bit more. "What languages have you studied?" will get you a better answer from a linguist than "What languages do you know?"
Sometimes linguists are like language spies. This has to do with what I was describing in the first paragraph. When people find out they're talking to a linguist they get self conscious and don't talk as they normally would. Therefore, linguists sometimes have to be sneaky. There is a variety of ways in which linguists have tricked people into talking naturally, for research purposes. I'm not going to reveal them to you, just in case.
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