34.1223, Featured Linguist: Jeff Mielke

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LINGUIST List: Vol-34-1223. Fri Apr 14 2023. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 34.1223, Featured Linguist: Jeff Mielke

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Date: 13-Apr-2023
From: Lauren Perkins [lauren at linguistlist.org]
Subject: Featured Linguist: Jeff Mielke


Every year as part of our fund drive, the LINGUIST List features a
number of linguists on our blog whose research is of particular
interest to our readers, whose lives as linguists or path to
linguistics has been remarkable, or who’ve impacted and contributed to
the worldwide linguistics community. This week's Featured Linguist is
Professor Jeff Mielke of North Carolina State University.

Jeff writes:
I think the future of linguistics is going to involve a lot of talking
about language with people who aren't linguists. To elaborate, I would
like to describe my present, not because I think *I* am the future of
linguistics, and not because I think my present is particularly
unusual, but because I think my present differs in interesting ways
from the future I imagined when I was a student. I studied phonology
in a big linguistics department and read articles by phonologists who
worked in other big linguistics departments. The future I imagined was
a lot like what I knew then. I imagined that I would be a good
phonologist, get a job in one of those other linguistics departments,
keep doing similar things, and train others to follow in my footsteps.
I imagined that I or someone else would also find a wonderful societal
impact of all of it at some point. Reflecting on this later, I
realized that even people whose main focus is the impact or
application of their work struggle to have the impact they want, and
if this was important to me I would need to focus on it more directly.

Almost every job I ever applied for I found out about from LINGUIST
List. I got two very nice jobs in linguistics departments this way.
The most important event in my career was about ten years ago when I
was lucky enough to become a spousal hire in the English Department at
North Carolina State University. NCSU was and still is well known
among linguists for its sociolinguistics but not for its phonology.
Within the university, the College of Engineering dominates. For a few
years, I felt like the most marked professor at NCSU. I was at an
engineering school but I was in the English Department, but wasn't
doing regular English stuff because I was one of the (socio)linguists,
and I wasn't even one of the sociolinguists, I was the phonologist.

The feeling of belonging came gradually, and a lot of it came from
outside of linguistics (even though my linguist colleagues are
lovely). A student introduced me to the Electrical and Computer
Engineering senior design program, where I can go every fall to pitch
a linguistics-related engineering problem and have a group of students
work to solve it over a whole school year. This is how our phonetics
lab got its robot tongue, among other nice things, and how we ended up
collaborating with textiles scientists. About five years ago, some
orthodontists from the UNC dental school contacted me about a speech
project. They wanted to be able to give candidates for jaw surgery
(and their insurance companies) good information about whether the
surgery would improve their speech. I could help by teaching them how
to use ultrasound to study tongue movements. I got involved in their
acoustic analysis too, and now I am regularly interacting with smart
people who know a lot about dentistry and want to learn anything I can
teach them about language, and we work together on things whose
societal impact is easy for me to describe and work toward. These
projects also give me a chance to work with large datasets from
speakers with very well-measured vocal tract differences, something I
wanted anyway.

A few years ago my department acquired all the speech-language
pathology prerequisite courses that were being phased out by our
Communication department. What came with them was a steady population
of pre-speech-language pathology students who are highly motivated to
learn what I can tell them about language, who then go to graduate
school for two years and consistently get jobs helping others with
speech. I was excited to teach more speech classes, but I found out
that an important thing the students need from me is guidance about
preparing for graduate school in a field I did not study in. It has
taken some work (and some help from our recent graduates) for me to
learn enough to provide good support to our current students, but I
now understand this to be a key part of my job.

When I look around the room at my lab meetings I see dentists, speech
pathologists, linguistics and pre-speech-pathology undergraduates,
sociolinguistics grad students, a phonetics postdoc, and Erik Thomas,
who all come regularly to talk to each other about phonetics. It's not
a future I could have described as a grad student, but I'm glad I was
open to new opportunities. I describe this not because I think
anyone's future will turn out exactly like my present (but let me know
if yours does!), or to suggest that you have to be in an unfamiliar
environment to do nice things. I do think being outside a linguistics
department made me more open to certain opportunities that have turned
out to be extremely rewarding parts of my job. My advice for the
future of linguistics is to remember that you have a lot of useful
knowledge, and consider that it's probably useful to a wider range of
people than you expect. Some of them are dedicating their careers to
things related to language, and some help from you could go a really
long way. Keep an eye out for those people.
------

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