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‘Sociolinguistics Turned Out to Be the Very Path I’d Long Been Searching For’

Last year the Master’s Programme 'Language Policy in the Context of Ethnocultural Diversity' admitted its first cohort. Kira Tulchinskaya, a student of the programme, discusses her first year and what future students of the programme can expect (such as studying at the University of Manchester).

I earned my bachelor’s in Cultural Studies from HSE, and then studied in a master’s programme for a year at a different university. Unfortunately, the programme, which was on translation theory, ended up not being for me, and I decided to return to HSE and apply for a programme here. I registered for the HSE Olympiad for students and alumni and started studying. I decided that if I find studying for the competition interesting, I would try to join the programme.

At the time, I didn’t really know anything about sociolinguistics, except for an episode of the podcast, Lexicon Valley, that I listened to once about the language of female friendship

In sociolinguistics, there are a lot of possible paths you can take: you can study the problem of languages in large cities, bilingualism in children, or the intricacies of a government’s language policy, for example.

Classmates

People in my classes have backgrounds in political science, history, and, of course, linguistics and translation. I can’t speak for the others, but my friends and I really enjoy it. We often discuss things outside the classroom that we’re studying—for example, how class differences influence language. Recently I tried to summarize an article from The Herald of Anthropology to some friends who aren’t in the programme. They listened for a while and then politely changed the subject. This demonstrates two things: 1) my expectations of the programme have been met, and I’m very into what I’m studying; and 2) I have very good friends.

Programme Structure

At the beginning of the first year we had an introductory intensive course on sociolinguistics. For me that was especially useful since I had majored in something else during my undergraduate studies. We also had a course on anthropology where we read the foundational texts of the discipline, and a course on ‘Corpus Methods in Linguistics’—in this course we came up with solutions for purely practical issues using huge data sets. Our programme also has very interesting courses on the history of language policy in the USSR; we studied regional policies and cross-cultural discourse analysis. At research seminars we learned how to write articles and formulate research questions. This is important for any beginning researcher.

The five main advantages of the Master’s Programme ‘Language Policy in the Context of Ethnocultural Diversity’

 The instructors. We did not have a single useless or boring course. All our subjects—from mathematical statistics to bilingualism—were useful and interesting.

 Research Experience. Most likely, it’s my own fault, and I spent too much time on meaningless things instead of my studies, but the fact remains: after earning my bachelor’s, I was not especially competent in things like formulating a research topic or selecting secondary literature. I was quite well read, but it was only here in grad school that I honed the skill of applying my knowledge.

 Expeditions and Study Abroad. This year we went to Vladivostok for a week and studied language policy and language attitudes in the Primorsky region. It was an amazing experience! Next year some students are going to study abroad at the University of Manchester.

 Conferences and Master Classes with Leading World Experts. This spring Yaron Matras, a professor from the University of Manchester, visited, and we also had a sociolinguistics conference. The plenary speakers were Professer Matras and Professor Marina Terkourafi from Leiden University. Specialists from Durham University, the European University of St. Petersburg, Moscow State University, the University of Geneva, Stockholm University, and others also gave talks at the conferences.

 Interdisciplinary Approach. The Master’s Programme ‘Language Policy in the Context of Ethnocultural Diversity’ manages to be universal—it’s accessible and, most notably, it is interesting to grads from widely different fields. At the same time, sociolinguistics as a science is situated in quite a specific field, so you can’t say it is ‘about everything and nothing’—a label that tends to get attached to programmes in the humanities.

Future Plans

After graduation, I would like to work in the academic sphere with sociolinguistics. I know that’s a very ambitious statement. Right now, I’m studying the impact of school on the language shift in second-generation immigrant children. But I’m well aware of how much I still don’t know. I always felt the need for a special way of studying society and language, and sociolinguistics turned out to be the very path I’d long been searching for.

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