Left-handed male linguists

[Östen Dahl]

Over the years, many people have made the observation that there indeed
seem to be unproportionately many left-handed linguists. I think it should
be noted that quite a few of them are female (I could give a list but am
afraid to forget someone who will be offended). There is a huge literature
on correlations between handedness and all sorts of properties; the results
are extraordinarily contradictory which is probably due to the difficulties
in establishing who should be counted as left-handed or not. In many
countries left-handers are still re-trained to write with their right
hands; for this reason, the rates of apparent left-handers in the
population vary very much, with the U.S. at the top, according to my own
informal observations. Some things seem clear, though: there are more
left-handed men than women in general; left-handers are over-represented at
both ends of various scales, that is, there are more extremely gifted
left-handers but also more left-handers with various kinds of learning
problems. There are also more homosexuals, alcoholics, mathematicians,
architects and according to some rather perplexing observations, more
helicopter pilots. Fifty per cent of the U.S. presidents after the war have
been left-handed, including the three last ones. On the Internet, there are
lots of lists of "famous left-handers", regrettably the reliability seems
rather low. If there is also over-representation of left-handers among
linguists, it is thus not at all a unique phenomenon. How strong the
tendency really is is hard to say. I have also been thinking of doing a
survey but have so far refrained in view of the difficulties of getting a
reliable result.
Östen Dahl
left-handed male linguist