Since I was very young, I’ve always loved language. I remember reading dictionaries, just for fun. Language was also a big part of my work as a communications practitioner and policy researcher for more than 20 years.
I’ve always been fascinated by foreign languages, I have the utmost respect for people who speak more than one language, especially in a country like Australia which is essentially monolingual in its language habits. French is now my second language (my L2 in linguistic jargon) and although not fluent, I now consider that I’m sufficiently bilingual to be very comfortable in a french-speaking environment.
In 2013, I decided to take this a step further and enrolled for a masters in applied linguistics at Monash University, completing in 2015. I am now halfway through a PhD, trying to better understand how and why people argue about genetically modified organisms (GM) in food and agriculture.
Stephen Fry sums up nicely why I not only love working with ‘language’ but why it fascinates me so:
Language is my whore, my mistress, my wife, my pen-friend, my check-out girl. Language is a complimentary moist lemon-scented cleansing square or handy freshen-up wipette. Language is the breath of God, the dew on a fresh apple, it’s the soft rain of dust that falls into a shaft of morning sun when you pull from an old bookshelf a forgotten volume of erotic diaries; language is the faint scent of urine on a pair of boxer shorts, it’s a half-remembered childhood birthday party, a creak on the stair, a spluttering match held to a frosted pane, the warm wet, trusting touch of a leaking nappy, the hulk of a charred Panzer, the underside of a granite boulder, the first downy growth on the upper lip of a Mediterranean girl, cobwebs long since overrun by an old Wellington boot.