Host Gatley Stone interviews some of NC State’s most distinguished professors to learn about their research and how they made it to where they are today. This series is made possible thanks to NC State's student radio station, WKNC 88.1 FM HD-1/HD-2.
Gatley Stone 0:01
Hello everyone. Today we are joined by Walt Wolfram, very accomplished professor. I'm very excited to be able to interview him. He was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2013 he received the North Carolina Award, which is the highest honor that a citizen of North Carolina can be granted. And just to give you some more perspective, I've checked out his resume, and it's 38 pages long. So welcome. Thanks for having me. So the first question, just an intro question, what is your job title?
Walt Wolfram 0:40
Well, I'm actually the William C Friday distinguished university professor for English linguistics, which should take up the whole interview. I have a long title, because I'm a distinguished professor, and I also have an endowed chair. So, so you know what an endowed chair is no okay, an endowed chair is where they raise a certain sum of money. And as a professor, you you can use the dividends from that money for discretionary projects that you want to do, and they also add part of that to your salary. So I get so I get more salary than the regular professors, and I also get more important to me since I make enough money. Money actually is the fact that I get funds. So I have $100,000 a year to use as I wanted to use. So I can hire Research Associates, I can invest in production of documentaries and so forth. So I can do what I want with it.
Gatley Stone 1:43
And how long have you had that? 32 years.
Walt Wolfram 1:48
So I was the first distinguished professor in in the College of CHASS, the College of Arts. What is it? Social Sciences, yeah.
Gatley Stone 2:04
So how long have you been teaching at NC State, 32
Walt Wolfram 2:07
years.
Gatley Stone 2:08
Yeah. Okay, so now we're going to do some background questions. When you were a child, what did you want to be when you grew up? I
Walt Wolfram 2:19
wanted to be a a professional athlete or a missionary, okay? Not an academic, yeah, actually, actually, for an academic, I have a very strange background, okay, my parents have an eighth grade education. They were immigrants from Germany. I have a family of six children. I'm the only one of the six children who actually even has a college degree out of the six kids. Yeah, and as a matter of fact, where I grew up, in North Philadelphia, was already working class. My parents sort of were laborers. My mother was a domestic I didn't even know a college graduate. So I had no academic aspirations at all. All my parents wanted me to do was be good in school. Yeah,
Gatley Stone 3:11
yeah, that's, that's, I'd like to get more into that. So it sounds like you obviously weren't always set on going to college, like did you, obviously, so did you? What were you considering for alternatives, and when did you begin to decide that I actually do want to go to college? Well,
Walt Wolfram 3:34
actually, I was an athlete, and so I wanted to continue playing sports. Yeah, after high school, so I went to a division three school, and I was also very religious. Okay, so I was a conservative Christian, and so I was very religious, and so my aspirations were very relatively limited. Either I wanted to play sports, and that's why I went to college, or I was going to be a preacher or a minister or something like that. So, so actually, academics was not even, I didn't. I knew no one who went to college, so it wasn't in my even as an alternative.
Gatley Stone 4:16
And was, were you a basketball player?
Walt Wolfram 4:20
I played basketball and football in college, okay, okay, at that point, people could still play two sports in college. Oh, yeah.
Gatley Stone 4:28
How did you choose your major?
Walt Wolfram 4:34
Another funny story, okay, actually,
Gatley Stone 4:36
I think I've seen, I watched some of your interviews last night. I think it was about you wanted to translate the Bible into, right? Yeah, an unknown language. Yeah,
Walt Wolfram 4:46
that's what I wanted to do as a Christian missionary.
Gatley Stone 4:49
And what was the thought process behind that? Did you have any specific languages that you were aware of that needed to be translated? Well,
Unknown Speaker 4:58
there were, there were lots of. Languages. I was with a cook group called the Summer Institute of Linguistics, or the Wycliffe Bible Translators. And they would go into tribes that didn't even have a an orthography, and so they would first analyze the language, and then they would develop an orthography, and then they would translate the Bible. So, so that's why I needed linguistics as a background, and so that's why I get into it. But, but actually, before then, I figured, because I was so out of sorts in terms of college that I was a first generation and it was a whole new world. I never even visited the college I went to before. I mean, so this was really sort of a I figured the only thing that I would be smart enough to do would be physical Ed. Nothing against physical Ed. But then I took a course in physical Ed, I said Oh, my God, I can do more than this. And so that's so actually, I started taking languages, you know, I took Greek and Hebrew and Latin and languages and Spanish and and so forth. And actually, when I was in college, I realized, Oh, this is something I'm really talented at. You know? I was a, I was a hardworking student, and I was adequately bright, but I never defined myself by my brightness. I was always sort of like, you're smart for an athlete, and you know what that means, but which is one reason why I love sports and I saw sort of also am supportive of academics in college and so forth. So I have a special sort of warmth in my heart for for athletes. So what
Gatley Stone 6:49
did your parents and the people that you grew up with think about you going to college considering like you were essentially the only one that you were close with that went to college? Yeah,
Walt Wolfram 6:59
well, my parents thought, oh, it's nice to go to college if you want to. But they didn't really worry about it. And actually, actually, they couldn't correct my English, because they spoke broken, broken English, you know, because they were from Germany and didn't come over until the 20s, and so in their 20s, so, they thought it was a nice activity, but there was no push, you know, to do it. I just sort of decided this is what I wanted to do, because I didn't really have any idea what I could do other than that, because I was mostly an athlete, and I loved it, and so I just did it. And then when I got to college, you know, I was doing fine, you know, this was, of course, was before, before grade inflation, you know. But I was sort of okay, a fundamental B student. But then when I took languages, I was, all of a sudden, the star of the class. And that just, it just came very easy. And then I took a linguistics course on how to analyze languages and so forth. And that was also something, and so, so it was something that I realized that I had a little bit of a talent, yeah, you know, I take a sociology course, and I get to be and, okay, that's fine, you know? But I was no no star or anything. But then when it came to linguistics and language, I thought, Oh, here's something. And I really like doing it's like little puzzles and so forth. So I got psyched about it.
Gatley Stone 8:31
In the interview I watched, you mentioned what you didn't expand on, why? Why did you end up not becoming a missionary and trying to translate an unknown language.
Walt Wolfram 8:41
Yeah, actually, the organization we were going to go to, you have to, you have to get churches to support you. And so they would donate. The problem was, we grew up in a German missionary church, so they gave their money to the the missionaries who were German, who came to the United States, so our church had no support. I married a girl from the church who was German, and so the two of us didn't have support. And I had one baby and one on the way, and so I couldn't get enough money for them to even let me go, because you have to be threshold. So So I needed to take a job. Yeah, and a former professor of mine at Wheaton College where I went, he hired me, and he always said, oh, you should be an academic, you know, she I never thought of it. And so when I couldn't get money to go to the mission field, I decided I needed to take a job, and so he gave me a job doing research. So I did research at the Center for Applied Linguistics in Washington, DC, for about four or five years, and I got to write a couple of books and so forth. And at that point, I seem to begin, you know, confidence and a little bit of. Reputation. So I just said, well, and after four years, he just said, Well, come, come work with me. And we started the first social linguistics program in the in the, in the nation, at Georgetown University. So, so that was my first baptism.
Gatley Stone 10:18
Did you get a master's and then a PhD. Yes, I got a master's and then a PhD in linguistics, right? Was the where was those from?
Walt Wolfram 10:26
I started at the University of Chicago, where I did my master's, and then I went to Hartford seminary Foundation, which had a linguistics program, and got my PhD there, actually, because there were a lot of there were a lot of religious people who were missionaries, who needed linguistics background. It was something that they taught at some seminaries. And so I went there and got my PhD there.
Gatley Stone 10:51
And was that before or after Georgetown? No,
Walt Wolfram 10:56
that was before Georgetown. Yeah. So I got my PhD and then my first teaching job was at Georgetown,
Gatley Stone 11:02
so the Hartford professor that was, that's where you got your bachelor's degree,
Walt Wolfram 11:09
right? No, I got my bachelor's degree at Wheaton College in Illinois, and Hartford was after you graduated from, yeah, we got the University of Chicago, and then I went to Hartford seminary foundation for my PhD. Yeah,
Gatley Stone 11:21
so how did you decide that? How did you go from having a bachelor's degree and then wanting to be a missionary and then go to decide to get a master's degree and then decide to get a PhD?
Walt Wolfram 11:35
Well, actually, actually, the organization, what I was going to was very eager to get people with graduate degrees in linguistics, because they needed them with linguistic ability in order to translate the Bible. And so they encouraged graduate study. And so they encouraged me to do graduate work, of course.
Gatley Stone 11:58
So you had so you went into your master's and PhD still intending to write Yes,
Walt Wolfram 12:04
yes, okay, as a matter of fact, one of the reasons I left the I left the University of Chicago is because at Hartford seminar foundation, I could take courses like in translation, and I needed a background In Hebrew and so forth, and at University of Chicago, they were more secularly oriented. But I still didn't, I still didn't dream of sort of academics at Oi.
Gatley Stone 12:33
And how did you have a challenge of being able to afford to get a master's degree or a PhD?
Walt Wolfram 12:41
Well, I got married right after college. I married my high school. I see your bachelor's degree? No, yeah, after my bachelor's degree, my my wife, doesn't have college degree. She's very bright and and has taken courses in college and so forth, but she doesn't have a degree, but she worked at home, and so she saved up money to help us pay for our graduates.
Gatley Stone 13:08
That's nice to hear. Yeah,
Walt Wolfram 13:10
she was very supportive.
Gatley Stone 13:13
Okay, so now I'm excited to get into your research. So one of the, like, main things that I saw of your research, that I thought was very cool was your research into the like the hoy toys of right, Coke. How did you initially hear about that population?
Walt Wolfram 13:37
Okay, so, So previous to that time, the reason the I'm considered to be a pioneer in the study of social linguistics was that there wasn't a field at that point. And I and in 1967 I did a big study of Detroit African American speech. So I went to the city of Detroit, and all summer interviewed people in the community there, and so we collected over 700 interviews. So that became one of the first studies on African American English.
Gatley Stone 14:09
How did that study initially start? What was that
Walt Wolfram 14:12
my mentor, who was my college professor, got a grant to study it from the Office of Education because, and then the reason he reason he did that was because it was post integration. But people were, were pointing out sort of the the difference in performance of African American students versus white students, you know, the the long standing educational gap and so and so there were concerns about by the government of how language fit into that. And so we proposed a study to do that in Detroit. So So one summer, we went out in the field and and interviewed, you know, hundreds of African Americans in Detroit. Right? And at that point, Detroit was still sort of, there was still sort of during the Great, the great migration, and so lots of African Americans were coming there and settling up. And that's and that's when we that's when we sort of discovered, wow, the language of African Americans in these northern cities like Detroit, Philadelphia, New York City and so forth. It's very different from the whites. It's got southern isms, and because of the de facto segregation, you know, they didn't see many white people. They were in black schools and so forth. And so their language was very distinct from the whites of Detroit. So,
Gatley Stone 15:41
yeah, I saw an interview where you said, which I found very interesting, that
Walt Wolfram 15:47
that, well, you did your research,
Gatley Stone 15:50
there was more difference between, yeah, the white population and the black population, or there was, there was less difference between white speech and black speech 100 years ago, then that's right, that's right, like, closer to the present. And you said that the reason was, or I guess, yeah, the reason was because, after the Great Migration, a lot of the housing projects, like, essentially segregated, right? The large like all of the incoming black people into projects, so they were essentially isolated. And,
Walt Wolfram 16:26
yeah, so, so actually, they didn't see many white people, yeah, you know, the postminster, or the mailman, or someone like that, or the the guy who ran the store, you know, and so, so actually, was, what people don't realize is that during the Great Migration, they developed into greater de facto segregation than they existed in the south, because there were field hands, and there were some whites among those, and so forth, and so there was and even Today, I could play you examples of African Americans who lived on the coast of North Carolina since the 1700s and you would say they sounded white. They don't sound that different because they picked up. They lived together. They they actually worked together more than people in the north so in Philadelphia, where I grew up, you know, we were in a segregated German neighborhood where people spoke German and so forth. We didn't have African Americans in our neighborhood. There was, there was a band of several miles where all the African Americans lived. They didn't interact much with whites at all. They went to all black schools and so forth and so that situation where we have a sort of really, really density issues. And there were, you know, this was all sort of, this was all sort of planned in terms of, oh, here's where blacks, here's where whites live. You know, it wasn't, it wasn't legal, but it was normative and so and so people sort of think it's strange, but there was much more segregation in the north than there was in the South. I mean, they had a society that a society that was separate and to some extent, but there was actually a lot more sort of interaction between the communities than than existed here in the North, or that existed in the north and so and so. That was a situation that was really surprising, that African American English was becoming more distinct, rather than less, because of the population density, you know. So, so we went into a project in in Detroit, there were like six, six apartment buildings, 12 stories high, 8000 people, not a black person, not a white person in there. Yeah, was all black people and and so in that sort of situation where they don't see where they interact with, or interact with, with with others who are African American, you know, it's a situation where the language keeps developing and differently from ones. So that was a very intriguing kind of situation.
Gatley Stone 19:04
Was the discovery that the the dialects were becoming more distinct? Was that a discovery that you and your colleague made? Or was that known prior to that?
Walt Wolfram 19:16
No, it was. It was a it was a study that came out in the after, after, we sort of started studying these and then looked at earlier African American English. At that point in the 60s, we did mostly studies in large urban areas that were not southern. So Los Angeles, Philadelphia, New York City and Detroit, you know, were the major cities. But then when we looked at the south, we saw them. When i i also then did some studies in Mississippi, and I saw that some of the speech was more similar. And then when I came to North Carolina, I investigated communities like, for example, the. And on the coast of North Carolina, there have been blacks and whites living in the mainland together since the 1700s early 1700s first decade of the 1700s they've lived isolated lives because there were no roads in there. Everything was done through the sort of liver rivers and canals. They live together there. They sound the same because, and so when we saw that, and then, so here's what happens when they move north, they segregate, you know, because of that population on the on the coast of North Carolina, which was really sort of a unique community, where we have sort of 300 years of isolation and whites and blacks living together. About a third of population was African American. We say, Oh, that's very different from the situations in north where, in those communities, everybody knows everybody you know, there aren't that many people. They interact actually, a lot of a lot of black men became worked on the water. And there was even a, there was an even an underground railroad that was done by the by the maritime industry. So they would, blacks would shelter people, and they would get and and they would get ships going north to take their their runaway slaves to the north. So, so there was, there was a component of the underground railroad that existed on the coast of North Carolina
Gatley Stone 21:35
that that reminds me of a question that I had so well, in regards to the hoy touters, it's, I think it said that that dialect was derived from like a dialect spoken In Britain between 1650 and 1750 and also, similarly, the You had said that the black accent 100 years ago was more similar. So my question is, how can you tell what how a dialect sounded? You know, 300 years ago or 100 years ago, if you only have writing of it,
Walt Wolfram 22:24
yeah, well, actually, sometimes, sometimes writing is, is, is quite and can be indicative of how people speak, particularly when you don't have standardized writing. So for example, if a person, and this is true of these if a person writes a verb, third person, like he goes, if they write it without the s, which they often do if they don't speak the s, that's an indication that they had that feature, by the same token, sort of Having the speech of a person who was born, who was born in sort of the late 1800s or 1900s and we have lots of we have lots of recordings of slave narratives and so forth. They're also quite indicative of what the speech is like. So for example, in Ocracoke, in Ocracoke, we have, we had the speech of a a person who came there with her in our family is the only family, the only black family in the island of Ocracoke who came there in 1865 right at the close of the Civil War. They were the only family that lived in black family that lived in Ocracoke since that time, when we got there in 1990 Well, there was a woman who was who was in her in her early 90s, and we started interviewing her. So she was born in 1904 and she lived to be 104 and so sort of that gives us an indication of what their speech was like when they came there. Yeah,
Gatley Stone 24:03
I think that's so awesome how there's, like, living historical artifacts, you know, that's really
Walt Wolfram 24:10
cool. And that's, that's why we go into a community. We interviewed people as old as we can get, yeah, you know, years old we don't. And actually, since we can, sort of, you don't even have to speak. You don't have any to be coherent speaking, if you just talk. So you know where we go to get these folks we go to old folks homes, right? So we go down to, we go down to high county, or just this isolated County. Say, Okay, let's go to the old folks home. Well, we're not sure that person, they have a little dimension, but if they can talk, they don't have to make sense. Let's see. So that's how that's you know, because spoke recorded languages. Always much more useful than written language. We can work with it, but there are lots of caveats that you have to deal with. So
Gatley Stone 25:08
I saw that you said in an interview that North Carolina has the richest linguistic heritage, and I think variation. Do you really believe this? And why do you do you think that's the case? Because I think like a state like Virginia would be very similar geographically, and maybe like a state like Texas would be more diverse geographically, yeah. Well,
Walt Wolfram 25:34
to a certain extent I say this as a used car salesman, it sounds good. But then, when you think about North Carolina, okay, first of all, we have mountains. North Carolina is, is, is the, the most demographically sort of peculiar state east of the Mississippi River. So we have mountains, you know, and we have the Scots Irish who came in through Philadelphia, no one went out to Pittsburgh and then down along the Great wagons trail. So they settled Appalachian, and then we had the coast, where we had people who settled in Virginia and then went down the coast by water. So So, for example, there are islands in Virginia that sound a lot like the islands of the Outer Banks, because that's where the people came from. And then, and then we had the fusion of African Americans, who came both from Virginia and up from Charleston. And then we have, like the Lumbee Indians, who are really distinctive. And now we have hispanicized English. So so actually, sort of because it's the most diverse type topography, and the migratory routes were different. And North Carolina was set up to be a state with sort of small towns, not the big towns that eventually developed. So was set up by small community. So there was lots and lots of diversity. You know, from the coast to the mountains, in a sense, is a so. So there's a sense in which you know who's counting, yeah,
Gatley Stone 27:09
but, but we definitely are. We have. We're definitely towards the top of the
Walt Wolfram 27:15
list. We're definitely towards the top of the maybe at the top Yeah, and it's interesting because, because nobody's really argued, yeah, but think about it. So the guys get on TV and they say, We have the largest used cars inventory of anybody in the United States, and nobody's getting up and saying, No, you don't so a little bit,
Gatley Stone 27:45
yeah. How did you? How do you find out about, like, isolated groups like the Hoyt toys or the, you know, maybe isolated groups in the athletics Columbia, yeah, yeah, by virtue of like they have the the accent, because they're isolated. So they in that way they're kind of hard to find. It's with same
Walt Wolfram 28:10
Yeah. So, so actually, when I came to North Carolina in 1991 or 92 we didn't know anybody here. They just sort of invited me cold call because of they had heard about me, and so they invited me so we didn't have friends. So my wife and I came. Our kids were were pretty much raised by that point, and they didn't join us, so we didn't have any friends. And so every weekend, we'd pick a different site to go to. So we'd go to Eden tin, you know, and then we go out west somewhere that just sort of, and we get a bed and breakfast, and then sort of ride around and talk to people and casual conversation. That's
Gatley Stone 28:52
cool. So it was kind of like a mix between work and pleasure, where you were kind
Walt Wolfram 28:56
of, yeah, well, we were trying to explore the state, but we also didn't have any friends, so it's not like we had a social to go to. So, so we, we sort of explored the city. And then one of my guys here said, Oh, you ought to go to Ocracoke. They speak Shakespeare in English there. Well, of course, they don't, but, but, you know, I said, well, people keep talking about this island, we should go there. So we just went and visited, and, you know, and I was in class, and I said, anybody know anybody from Ocracoke here? And a student said, My mother went to school with a person from Ocracoke. I said, Well, what was her name? Do you remember? So I called her, and as it turned out, she's she had gone to high school and college here and gone back to okra coke and was a big leader in the community. And said, Well, would you mind if we tell her that we know you and could talk direction? She said, Sure, so that's a so it's just sort of word of mouth, and then sort of once you're there, once you're there, it. Sort of like, okay, can you sell yourself? Yeah, can you, can you sort of relate to these people? And that's one of the one of the dimensions on my background is because I don't come from an educated, exclusive family, because I was sort of born in a working class neighborhood, I really relate well to working class people, kind of, in some ways, prefer them to middle class people. No, I don't prefer the politics, but, you know, so I'm very comfortable and and islands like this, like they don't care what kind of degrees you have. I mean, are you? Are you nice to them? You know? Are you funny? Like ochre cook. Ochre cook likes humor and so and so. So if you relate to them on that level, you know they like you, and so that, you know they don't care. You don't come in and say, I got a PhD in this stuff. You know, that's a that's a turn off, but if you can interact with them and play poker with them or something like that, you know? So, so that's what we did, and that really, that that really helps, you know? And it's true, and it's true of lots of working class communities, you know, the onus is on you to present yourself as a person that they don't mind interacting with, and, you know, drinking a beer, going to church with, or whatever.
Gatley Stone 31:31
So now I want, I'd like to shift a little bit so this is more, I guess, the philosophical perspectives on linguistics. So I'll start off with like an anecdote that really, like stuck with me. So my dad is from Southwest, Southwest Louisiana,
Walt Wolfram 31:53
okay, and Louisiana has a lot of linguistic diversity, yeah,
Gatley Stone 31:57
exactly. And he said that his when his grandparents were in elementary school, there was like French, like French Cajun kids, sure that would go to the elementary school, and if they were caught speaking French in the school, then they would be like beaten and they so essentially, like, the French language is pretty much dead there, yeah, or at least the French, like Creole language is pretty much dead there. And I think that's something that's so sad to me, because I, I mean, I haven't really sat down to really formalize my thoughts on it, but I, I always prefer like more differences, more diversity. I think that's so much more interesting of a, you know, world to live in, where people are different from you. You know, that's like, one of the main reasons I like to travel is that we you see something that you don't see every day. That's right. And so, I guess Mike, one of my questions is like, actually, I write, I wrote down a specific question. So should we teach proper pronunciation and grammar?
Walt Wolfram 33:15
That's a complicated question, and it's complicated because of how we view differences. See, I have no problem with people teaching what we call standardized English for whatever the purpose is. The problem is that when we start teaching that that's considered to be proper, right and correct, yeah. And the reason it's proper white, right and correct is because of who speaks. It, not because of language. All of these, all of these languages have dialects. So, so. So here's my approach. My approach is to try to get people to celebrate language diversity. So we go to the state fair every year. We give away 7000 buttons and so forth. You can have buttons and we and so we do documentaries on all of these dialects, on TBS and so forth. We've done 18 won a couple of Emmys and so forth. And the whole idea was, when I came to North Carolina, one of the things I realized about North Carolina is that it's a state that loves itself. So they so, they did? They do? They love the sort of diversity from the mountains to the ocean, you know. And they also love the fact that they have a they have these musicians, you know, James Taylor, people like that and and they have these poets, and they have these writers, and they have these artists and performers and so so it's what I what I thought was. But what about their language? Let's see if we can get them to celebrate their language, because it's so diverse and it's so neat, and it's really going to be sad when people can't hear the hoy toys to. Talk like that anymore, or the Lumbee Indians who have a distinct dialect and so forth, so. So what I try to do is celebrate the dialect. Try to not talk about standardized English so much as it's English for particular kinds of purposes. Yeah, if you want to be an academic, got to talk that way, all right, and that's how you're expected to write when you're doing a business world. But if you're an athlete, you know, there's a whole genre of sort of listening to a sportscast that is very different from this. And so rather than think of it as right and wrong, I think of it different purposes. So the So, the grammar that we are taught by our by our freshmen. You know, as a freshman here, you know it's not about right grammar versus wrong or bad. It's about grammar for more academic purposes. And by by emphasizing that you can still you can still celebrate and and so actually, one of the things we do here, we have a we have a group called linguistic diversity ambassadors. And what these students do is they go to freshman writing classes and talk about all the dialects of North Carolina and some of the patterns and rules and so forth, to instill this sort of pride and celebration of diversity, just as we celebrate sort of the great musicians who have distinct styles and so forth. So so our whole focus is on celebrating and and enjoying, as opposed to being caught up in right and wrong. So it's so so there's wallet, while it seems pretty simple, it's really sort of heavily ideological, you know. So we don't use terms like correct, proper and so forth, because, hey, if blacks were in charge of our that would be this. That would be the standard, you know, I mean, because there's plenty of evidence that it's the people who, sort of are the socially sort of privileged who who make language a part of them, and then they become the rules for language use. So so we do, sort of, there is a an underlying, sort of ideological message that really drives what I do, in terms of, in terms of what I teach. Yeah,
Gatley Stone 37:31
I I realized when I had wrote that question, I had put proper and right quotation marks, good for you. I didn't know. I forgot to say that, no, you're not
Walt Wolfram 37:41
just, I'm just saying, you know, and that's why, that's one of the reasons I teach a class for graduate students. I get 3540 students in a graduate class because I don't want to turn any down buddy down for the opportunity to learn that, yeah, and to celebrate, because it's so cool?
Gatley Stone 38:01
Another question I have, which is similar, along the same lines, so most linguistic diversity is comes from isolation, and as we become a more, you know, ever connected world, there's less isolation, like, vastly less isolation than there was, like, years ago. Opinions on that as well isolation, the lack of isolation will certainly bring about less linguistic diversity. Do you have any opinions on that?
Walt Wolfram 38:39
Yeah, yeah. Oh, well, that's, that's true, you know. And the reason, the reason ochrecote, for example, is losing its historical brogue, is because less than half the people who live there now are Islanders. Yeah, because people have houses there and they come in and so forth. That's what happened, by the same token, by the same token, though we're not so small islands are particularly sort of problematic in terms of maintaining it, but there are new dialects at the same time. So when I first started the study, people never talked about a California dialect, but now they're talking about a California dialect, and they mimic it on one of the California Girls and stuff like that, where they have, you know, who were they, where they had this sort of a raspy voice, and they and they, their sentences go up at the end rather than, rather than down. So, so there, there are lots of things. So, so while we're losing dialects like those in Ocracoke and to some extent, Appalachian so forth. There are new dialects in North Carolina and Northern California. There are new dialects, like there's a Seattle dialect now there's a Portland dialect. And it used to be there weren't any of these sort of dialects. So they're shifting. And you're right, that small the. Small dialect areas that that were formed because of isolation or maintained before isolation are certainly endangered. Now,
Gatley Stone 40:08
do you think that there should be, like, any policies in place that could help like, I don't know, preserve that well,
Walt Wolfram 40:15
actually, that's what we do. I mean. So, for example, when we go into we have a website that has over 3500 interviews that we've done here in North Carolina? And so all of the we've done about 130 interviews on Ocracoke, all of those are preserved on a website. They have old people, middle aged people and young people, you know, and and so I often get requests from people you know. My my grandfather died, and I just wanted to hear how he sounded. You know, could you send us a file of the interview you did with them? And we'll do that, and so forth. So we can't change it. We can't change the fact, because that's a sort of community. Think, Do you want to talk like that still, you know, and there are pockets of people, you know, who really embrace it, who use it, but for the most part, that's a community's decision. But we also want the community to know that this is something we want to celebrate. And actually what we found because we teach eighth graders every year for 30 years, we go in and have a whole week with social studies when they study the history of North Carolina, about the dialects of North Carolina. And that's really changed the attitudes of the people now you really think through dialect of school, even though that's awesome because they marry outsiders, at least in their second marriages. So, so, yeah, I mean, that does change things by the same token, but by the same token, you know, because one of the questions we get as well, does media and social media make a difference? Yeah, it makes a difference. But for the most part, people want to speak like people they interact with, you know, yeah, you don't interact with the newscaster, you know, talk back then where you might yell on him, but you don't expect, you don't want to model him.
Gatley Stone 42:13
Yeah, I think, well, it is speaking of like, sort of new dialects. There's a lot of, like, new slang and like, really weird stuff coming out of Tiktok.
Walt Wolfram 42:26
I know, yeah, I'm
Gatley Stone 42:27
not sure if you're aware of it, but it's become kind of a joke recently about how much like goofy stuff. Yeah,
Walt Wolfram 42:35
goofy stuff. And then, and then, because it's anonymous, you know, some of the stuff this is for my students to do. That's what they like doing, that we have a site on Tiktok, and they put stuff up there, and so forth. And there's a whole issue of commodification, where, because it can be anonymous, whites can sound try to sound black, and so forth. So there's a lot of, there are a lot of issues about that, but, but pretty much, pretty much, it's, you know, you can detect these sorts of things. So, so you're a little young for this. But anyhow, the night, OJ Simpson, there was a Friday night where he was, he was in a van, and he was driving around, and the cameras were following him, and so forth. And the news was, you know, OJ Simpson is in a car now, and are they going to what's going to happen? And a guy got on TV said, We're just talking to someone who can see OJ in the car, you know. And I'm going to put them on, you know. And so he says, oh, so what does OJ look like? And He says he'd be scared. And I said to my wife, that's not a black person, that's a white person, trying to sound, first of all, he wouldn't say he scared, because that's used for habitual activity by blacks. Whites don't know that, so they just use it as a substitute for eight years, you know, but, but so you can so, so a trained ear can hear the commodification that's but it, but it is an issue where whites can take on black speech, you know, and use some of the terms and so forth. I realize that and that and that does have an effect, you know, on on slang, to a certain extent, we're actually, I'm actually on a board now for the Oxford English Dictionary, the sort of world's Dictionary of English where we're doing a dictionary of African American language. Oh, that's cool. So in Neo historical, which looks up first uses, and stuff like that, just like you would use the sort of English dictionary.
Gatley Stone 44:47
Wow. So, just to close out, maybe give so that way we can help. You know, maybe the people that are listening to the. Is, if you had to give some advice to a student that's considering getting either a master's degree or a PhD and becoming a professor, what pieces of advice would you give to them? General professor? Yeah, any any kind of professor.
Walt Wolfram 45:17
My advice to people who want to become professors is that you better be a lifelong learner. It's not, it's not taking what you learn as a graduate student. There was no discipline that that I helped start at the time. Yeah. And one of the things, one of the things you realize, is that educating students is a lifelong matter. And so, so I'm 83 years old, you know. So I was doing this before computers, you know, my first four books were written on a typewriter. We didn't have word processes, yeah, you know. So if you think that what you learn as a student is going to be sufficient to teach you better. Think it's something else, because everything is different. I got my first computer in 1984 you know, I had never used a computer before, and so if I hadn't learned that, and and, you know, some people say, Well, I have my knowledge. You know, no, you don't, you know, there's so much, imagine all of the things that didn't exist when I first started teaching, you know? So, so, so. But by the same token, as you get older, the continual learning helps your mind. Yeah, and I love learning new stuff, you know. And so in a sense, if you love to learn, it's a great profession, if you think you're an expert, and just just pube knowledge that you learned in graduate school, good luck. You'll be done in 10. So, so, so, so the fact that that I can learn new stuff all the time, and that, you know, and that my students teach me things. So when I was, when I came out, I never thought that I'd be producing documentaries, you know. You know, all of our first initial documentaries were analog, and now they're all digital, you know. And I have documentarians. I don't, I don't do documentaries, but I, I have a topic I'm interested in. I raise money to do it and make and I can get somebody to do it. So, so, so the other thing about, about continue learning is academics need to be more entrepreneurial, and think of what hasn't been done and that you can do, yeah, to help education, you know. So just teaching your old college notes ain't going to do it, yeah, you know. And so now, you know, when I first taught, there was no PowerPoint, there wasn't even xeroxing, right? You just got up and talked, yeah, you know, you can't do that anymore if you don't have, if you don't have something from Tiktok, you know, from Facebook, you know, and from all the social media, and if you don't have visuals for them to interact with, and if you can't do sexy PowerPoints and so forth, You know, because, because you're fighting for kids attention, yeah, you know. And, and the third aspect of that that's really interesting is, it's not so much about facts anymore, you know, because I can say something and not be sure and say, look that up, you know. And anybody in the class, anybody in the class with a phone, can look up and see if I'm telling the truth or not, you know, look up and see if that's the year that happened, or something like that. So, so, so you can't get away because you're the expert, you know, and there's lots of knowledge you don't have, yeah, and so, sort of, and so, in that sense, sort of working more collaboratively with students. You know, lots of students are smarter than me. You know, want to be smart to help me. So. So I really my approach, my approach to to learning and teaching is much more entrepreneurial. I none of my Well, none of my kids ever took a linguistics course. I have four kids, but three of them are venture capitalists and are extremely entrepreneurial, and they're making it because, because, as as, as my one son says, who owns a venture capital system, he says, anybody can crunch the numbers. You gotta get out there and be creative and be able to talk and write and sell. What you're doing. So, so there's a sense in which I think that's that's also true of education. If you, if you, if you teach in a sort of, you know, low interest area, like, how many people are interested in linguistics, you know, you gotta sell it, man, yeah. You gotta tell them why it's important and why it's cool and why they need to know about it, and why they'll be and why they'll be better off for the rest of their life having this approach to language differences. So so I'm very sort of into sort of a entrepreneurial as as an educator, and not limited by the way things are supposed to be.
Gatley Stone 50:41
Thank you for that. I really enjoyed the interview. And
Walt Wolfram 50:44
if you have any any other questions, you know, or if you have any follow up that you want to just email me and I, you know, I'll give you the time that you need, because, as you can tell, I'm here at 83 Yeah, not because I need the money. Yeah, I'm here because I love what I do. I love hanging out with young people, because that way your colleagues don't die. Most people, okay, most, most people who are 83 these are conversations, what doctor did you go to today? And which of my friends died? You know, I get to hang out with kids. Who are, you know, talking about stuff that's happening in the real world, what they're going to do with their life, you know, yeah, who they're in love with, and all that sort of stuff. That's really fun.
Gatley Stone 51:47
Well, thank you.
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