Linguistics

This is going to be a very short blog to mark my retirement from The University of Huddersfield (on 6th October 2022) after 33 years of employment. It hasn’t been a happy end to my ‘career’ as the university decided to close down our courses and make my colleagues redundant in June, leaving me with no team to be attached to in my retirement and thus no academic ‘home’ with which to be associated as I continue my various research and outreach projects.

However, I don’t want to dwell on the negatives, so the failings of management in UK Higher Education which are wreaking such havoc on departments such as ours will be left for another day. I have been fortunate to have worked with many wonderful colleagues over the years and I want to pay tribute to the collegiality of academic linguists, at Huddersfield and beyond, who are almost without exception wonderful people and fantastic collaborators.

This strength of the linguistics community has been evident in the run-up to my retirement when I was not only accepted as a visiting researcher at Lancaster University but welcomed by fellow linguists with a warmth and enthusiasm which took my breath away and somewhat made up for the feelings of rejection which have been growing as I get close to leaving my post.

So, there will be more posts to come, mostly less personal and more concerned with linguistic observations. But for now, my love-affair with linguistics, which started at age 18 when I picked up David Crystal’s penguin book ‘Linguistics’ in our sixth form common room, continues.