yole's journey in languages

The midterms week has just ended, and now seems to be a good time to reflect on my experiences so far as a pre-master student of linguistics in Leiden University. TL/DR: it’s been quite challenging initially, but it’s becoming more and more fun.

(If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, the pre-master program in Dutch universities is open to those who already have a degree in a different field, and allows to start a master program after a year of preparatory studies, as opposed to a full three-year BA program.)

The first challenge that I’ve faced was organizing my study time (or, rather, filling the week with enough things to do). The official pre-master program in linguistics includes five courses in the first semester (phonology, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, linguistic typology and academic skills), taking up 10 hours of class time per week. The homework takes roughly as much for me, although it depends quite a lot on how deep you want to go into the material. All together, this is nowhere near full time, and I was quite keen on enrolling into more courses. Unfortunately, the official position is that pre-master students can only take additional courses if they’re added to their program, and I should have contacted them about that before the beginning of the study year (which I did, to no avail). You can talk to the professors and they can let you audit their courses unofficially, but for many courses you still need to be officially enrolled in order to get access to the course materials published online.

I ended up unofficially joining the Hittite course, and I should have taken more; I especially regret not having tried to join the basic phonetics course, where they teach you the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) and how to pronounce all the sounds in it. I’m quite surprised that it’s not a required part of the pre-master program, because IPA is the universal language of nearly all linguistics subfields, and I really miss having solid knowledge of it. I can of course learn it by myself, but I find it challenging, and I would really prefer to have a structured instruction.

Having said that, now I’m quite happy with how my time is spent. I’m continuing my work on Etymograph, I’ve again picked up the study of Old Norse, I’m quite active in the study association (more on that below), and I still have time to read random books and articles on linguistics and to do small research projects, such as the Quenya text analysis I published in September. (By the way, the Old Norse study now has a specific goal: it’s a requirement for the Summer School in Scandinavian Manuscript Studies in Reykjavik, and I really want to go there in the next summer.) And I hope that next semester I’ll be able to arrange a somewhat higher course load.

The second challenge is integrating socially into the student community. I’m very self-conscious about the age difference between other students and myself, I’m often unsure of how to talk about my past life experiences, and I don’t feel comfortable using the more informal communication style I see others use. And unfortunately the age difference issues are not only in my head: both me and my wife (she’s doing a pre-master in film studies here) were officially denied the possibility to join the student association dedicated to board games and TTRPGs, because “some of the younger members might be uncomfortable around you”.

Thankfully, the linguistics study association doesn’t care as much about my age, and I’m able to participate in quite a few activities there: I’m on the organizing team of this year’s student conference, I plan to contribute to the journal of the association, I’ve joined the conlanging community, and there’s quite a lot of social gatherings. Another very helpful thing was participating in the orientation week for international students in the end of August; I was unsure whether it’s worth doing it, but I’m really glad that we did. We had really nice hosts (thanks Diana and NyAnna!), and the people we got to know there became my first anchors in the student community. It’s also nice to be able to hang out with other pre-master students; they feel much closer to “my circle”, so I’m more comfortable around them.

Finally, I can’t help but mention budget cuts. Even this year, we can feel that the education is constrained by the budget: for example, the linguistic typology course we’re taking is the result of merging two courses, language description and linguistic typology, so we’re getting the academic credit of two courses for the amount of teaching of one course. And it’s only going downhill from there, despite my naive expectations that Leiden’s prominent role in the history of humanities would mean that it would endure longer than some other places. Even with the current level of funding, the faculty of humanities is losing 5M EUR every year, and it has already decided to close programs including Latin American and African studies (funnily enough, this happened two weeks after the opening of the brand new African Library). And starting from next year, the right-wing government of the Netherlands is cutting the funding of universities even more, and the impact of those cuts is still unknown. Protests are being organized, and I’ll be there, but honestly it’s hard to believe that it will change anything.

All in all, despite all the worries, right now I’m quite happy to be where I am. I love Leiden, I love studying, I love doing research, and I have solid ideas for several directions where my research could go in the future, up to the Ph.D. if it comes to that. And we’ll see what the future brings. 🙂