Not the actual car, but same make, model, and color.

So today I’m the proud owner of a new car. Well, it’s not new, just new to me. It’s a 1997 Mercury Tracer. I bought it from a friend who is in my linguistics program up at the U. He was selling it for cheap and it will get me from point A to point B, which is all I really need it for. It’s in relatively good shape for being 15 years old except for some of the paint is coming off and it has some sun damage, but other than that and a few minor scrapes and tears here and there it’s in pretty good condition. It has a manual transmission, which kind of freaks me out as Salt Lake City has a lot of hills and it’s been 9 years since I’ve driven a manual transmission and even then that was big semi trucks that would start rolling in 4th gear without having push the gas at all. I need to practice driving it around more and practice as I become a nervous wreck when I have to drive it, even though I’ve only driven it a few times. My last car, I sold four years ago to have some money to go live in France. I miss that car and wish I could afford a newer and better car but I’m a grad student and I’m only going to be here for another year so I only need something for the next year and then I’ll sell it and can hopefully buy  a new one once I move out of Utah.

Old map of France with regional flags, which also tend to represent language and dialect groups.

Unless you don’t read international news, you may know that François Hollande has defeated incumbent President of France, Nicholas Sarkozy. Not only is this a victory for French Socialists but also for regional and minority languages in France!

Hollande chose Bretagne as his first meeting place after his win and there he announced his intentions to ratify the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages. This charter, which was adopted in 1992 is meant to protect and promote historical regional and minority languages in Europe.

France signed the treaty but never ratified it, in fear of threatening the precious and sacred French language. At the meeting in Bretagne, François Hollande vowed that the French would ratify the Charter and that “they would do it together without threatening the French language”.

He went on to say “French will not be threatened but Breton must be taught and disseminated like all other regional minority languages [in France]“.

This would suggest that federal funding may go to programs that would teach languages like Breton, Basque, Occitan, Alsacien, etc. This is a major step for the French in terms of language rights and the protection of languages, some of which are highly endangered. I applaud François Hollande and the people of France. I will now keep an eye out to see if this truly does happen.

Every summer it seems that I remember that I have a webpage and I always do an overhaul of the design and then attempt to build it up again. It’s getting a bit ridiculous. I always end up giving up on it and realize that absolutely no one is actually reading anything that I’m posting so what’s the use, right? Well, I have a feeling that things are going to change. Either that, or I’m totally neurotic and think that I’m going to start being noticed more. Either way, a lot has happened in the past month or so. I feel like all of the hard work up to this point has really paid off. I titled this post ‘Starting Over’ because that is exactly what I’m doing with this website, I’m starting over and moving forward.

So most of those who are close to me know that when I applied to the University of Utah, I was applying here to work with Lyle Campbell. Unfortunately for me and a few others in the department, Lyle took a position at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa before I arrived and my plans quickly had to change. It took me a good year to decide which direction I wanted to go with my linguistics career and I finally concluded that I needed to go into a sub-field of linguistics that was going to be profitable (i.e. interdisciplinary). I settled on sociolinguistics. It wasn’t too difficult a choice given that I was already working for Dr. Marianna Di Paolo as the Lab Manager for the Shoshoni Project at the Center for American Indian Languages.

Last summer I decided that I wanted to study language, gender, and sexuality in relation to the heteronormativity of religion. Being in Utah, what better population to study than the LDS (Mormons). I began doing an initial literature review to see what kind of work had already been done. I wanted to propose my thesis topic before the beginning of the fall semester last year but because my duties at SYLAP became more than I expected, I was working a lot in the summer and wasn’t able to give as much time to reading and writing my proposal.

I thought I would have more time to work on my thesis last semester but that was also foolish of me to think. Because of the new course program implemented in the fall of 2010 (the semester my cohort entered the program), I had to take two core courses as well as a required elective upon three credit hours of thesis hours. I didn’t get very far because the semantic and syntax courses I was taking were tough. Also, it was really tough to get my 20 hours in at the Center for American Indian Languages and I decided in the end that I would be better off teaching courses for the Department of Linguistics–gaining more teaching experience–than continuing to work at the center. In the end it has been an excellent decision.

This past semester I had to take another elective course, which was required by my chair to take (sociolinguistics), as well as the final two core courses, advanced graduate syntax and phonology. Usually someone would have completed these courses and all other required courses by their second semester in the program. They would have completed the majority of their electives by the third semester and only had thesis hours and maybe one course their fourth and final semester.

Because of the new program and the times that courses were offered I’m taking three very important and essential courses my last semester when I’m supposed to be finishing up and defending my thesis. I now have to take another year to write my thesis before I can graduate and get my degree. Am I bitter? Not really. Sometimes I worry how it will look on my CV and when I apply to PhD programs that it took three years to complete my M.A. I know many people would have given up and quit if they had been in my position. I like to think that I turned a negative situation into a positive one and once I complete my Master’s Thesis and begin to publish parts of it in journals, it will have all been worth it.

I successfully proposed my thesis this semester. What does that mean you ask? Basically I had to do a literature review about my topic and see what research has already been done on the topic which I’m studying. I write up a proposal that informs my committee what I will be doing my research on for my thesis, including my research questions, my hypotheses, and how I plan to test my hypotheses. Dr. Di Paolo is really excited about my research, which in return makes me super excited about it as well. So far, the tentative title of my M.A. Thesis will be ‘Variation in a religious heteronormative community: Perceived phonetic correlates of gay-, same-gender attracted-, and straight-sounding speech of male Latter Day Saints’.

I have to make a few changes and edit the paper to turn into the IRB. I hope to get IRB approval by the end of May, early June and begin my sociolinguistic interviews by mid June. Along with doing my data collection for my thesis this summer, I will also being teaching one ESL course and a linguistics course. Both are courses on cross cultural communication, which I love teaching! I’m also going to probably help out part-time at SYLAP as well as being busy creating ‘Serpent’s Tongue’ a language for a game with the same name.

A little over two weeks ago, I received an e-mail from a group looking for connections to conlangers. They were actually looking for someone to develop a language for a RPG/card trading type game they were developing.  Being a conlanger myself, I responded to them telling them that I was indeed one. After looking at the project more in depth, I decided that I should probably have someone to work with me on this language, if I were to actually get the offer to create it. Since the background for the language relied heavily on the ancient world and ancient languages, I couldn’t think of anyone better to suggest than my colleague and friend, Jeff Pynes, who specialized in classics in undergrad, at Berkeley.

Fast forward a week and we met over webcam/phone conferencing with the project manager, Aaron Gabrielson, who then extended and offer to Jeff and I to be the language developers for the game. There aren’t many opportunities out there for even the more hardcore conlangers to develop a conlang commercially. Jeff and I are both extremely excited for this opportunity and it’s been fun to rediscover my conlanging self again. The game is called ‘Serpent’s Tongue’. You can see the Kickstart page by clicking here.

Other than these new developments, I got a part-time job with ETS (yes, the ones that make the GRE and other tests) to grade TOEIC tests, which as I understand it, will give me the opportunity to make some extra cash on the side every month that there are tests that need grading.  I’m currently working on a final paper for my sociolinguistics course, which I hope to develop into a conference style paper and submit to NWAV,which takes place the week after Pumpkin Show at Indiana University at Bloomington. I also discussed co-authoring a paper with Jeff to submit to NWAV as well. That means I have two manuscripts on which I need to write abstracts by May 30th to submit to NWAV.

I’ve been dating an extremely amazing guy since February and I really like him. Because he isn’t out to the majority of his friends, I won’t identify him, but he knows who he is. I’m extremely proud of him and his eagerness to learn more about life and about the field in which he studies. He’s really great, and my friends all seem to like him, though they don’t know him too well, I just hope my family and other friends will feel the same way. It’s been almost a complete year since I came out on Facebook to the world. It’s been a wonderful year of academic and personal growth and I can honestly say that I’m proud of the person I am becoming and have turned out to be this far.