Backgrounds?

[DV82LECM]

I'm curious, what is everyone's backgrounds in this field/interest? Mine? Wikipedia.

[Man in Space]

I'm curious, what is everyone's backgrounds in this field/interest? Mine? Wikipedia.

I have a bachelor’s in it. I actually got into it through conlanging.

[Arayaz]

I'm unfortunately too young to have any sort of degree. Wikipedia is basically my background as well ─ and the CBB, if that counts, as it was my first introduction to other conlangers.

[WeepingElf]

I have no academic background in linguistics - it is all self-taught from textbooks (which I checked out from the local university library), various web sites (including Wikipedia) and practical conlanging. In fact, it was my conlanging which got me into linguistics.

[eldin raigmore]

I'm curious, what is everyone's backgrounds in this field/interest? Mine? Wikipedia.

I’ve been interested in it since elementary-school age. When I was in about the 3rd grade, my parents were sent as missionaries to south India. The community there was highly international, and had people from all over India, as well as plenty of locals. They were all interested in accents and dialects of English. We came from Texas and they’d never heard a Southron American accent before; so we could all draw a crowd just by talking!
Also, my parents had to take lessons in at least two Indian languages (viz. Tamil and Hindi); and we schoolchildren also had to take lessons in Tamil and Hindi, although we didn’t have to pass some fluency requirement, like our parents did.
And I don’t remember why, but my father taught me the Greek alphabet!
….
From then on I kept learning every linguistic fact that randomly came to my attention.
I was taught Spanish in elementary school, French in high school, and German in graduate school.
I finally joined the CONLANG-L mailing list sometime during my second marriage. I learned a lot from them. Much of what I learned was that I was ignorant of some feature but could remedy my ignorance by consulting a certain book. So I read a lot of books: and also some journal articles.
I joined the ZBB and the CBB as well, and learned from them, similarly to the CONLANG-L.

….

I could also say that what WeepingElf said, applies also to me.

[lsd]

I'm not particularly well versed in linguistics,
in conlanging I'm closer to the coding of information,
but it's always interesting to see, a posteriori,
how a construction, from non-linguistic elements,
ends up responding to the linguistic descriptions of natural languages,
our humanity is there...

[LinguoFranco]

Like many here, I presume, most of it I got through Wikipedia. I always did have an interest in languages though. I was exposed to Spanish from a pretty early age despite being 0% Latino.

My dad knew some Esperanto, and I remember asking him in what country is it spoken in. That was when he explained to me the concept behind the language. I was like, "Whoa! You can make a language? Sounds like rocket science to me."

[Knox Adjacent]

Purely a hobbyist who started with Wikipedia and moved on to actual linguists' articles/books .

[KaiTheHomoSapien]

I have a degree in linguistics and Latin (ancient languages and historical linguistics were my focus while in college), but I’ve been conlanging since I was 11. It was studying Latin in middle school that largely got me interested in creating my own language, and it was conlanging and language learning that inspired me to study linguistics in college (I joined this site when I was still in high school).

[WeepingElf]

I have a degree in linguistics and Latin (ancient languages and historical linguistics were my focus while in college), but I’ve been conlanging since I was 11. It was studying Latin in middle school that largely got me interested in creating my own language, and it was conlanging and language learning that inspired me to study linguistics in college (I joined this site when I was still in high school).

Ah, another conlanger who contracted the "language bug" from Latin in school! It was Latin which got me into conlanging, too. I always loved it - its elegant phonology, its colourful morphology, its flexible syntax - and it has informed my conlanging style from the start. Of course, later came other sources of influence - Greek, Tolkien's Elvish languages, Georgian, Insular Celtic, to name the most important ones - but the base of my style was laid by Latin.

[KaiTheHomoSapien]

I have a degree in linguistics and Latin (ancient languages and historical linguistics were my focus while in college), but I’ve been conlanging since I was 11. It was studying Latin in middle school that largely got me interested in creating my own language, and it was conlanging and language learning that inspired me to study linguistics in college (I joined this site when I was still in high school).

Ah, another conlanger who contracted the "language bug" from Latin in school! It was Latin which got me into conlanging, too. I always loved it - its elegant phonology, its colourful morphology, its flexible syntax - and it has informed my conlanging style from the start. Of course, later came other sources of influence - Greek, Tolkien's Elvish languages, Georgian, Insular Celtic, to name the most important ones - but the base of my style was laid by Latin.

Same here. There's no denying my conlangs are all very IE-inspired ("shamelessly Latin-like" was how one person described Lihmelinyan when I first introduced it a long time ago). I was mesmerized by those declension and conjugation tables, so unlike English in many ways. It's been a major influence on my conlanging to this day.

[sangi39]

I have a BA in Archaeology, that included modules in the Bronze Age Eastern Mediterranean with some mention of Linear B. It wasn't the main focus of any module in particular (like Proto-Indo-European was only slightly mentioned in Marek Zvelebil's lectures on things like Demic Diffusion, and any time John Collis talked about Iron Age Europe), but I did my dissertation on the decipherment of Linear B, Mayan Hieroglyphs, and Egyptian Hieroglyphs (originally it was meant to be Sumerian Cuneiform instead of Mayan Hieroglyphs, but my dissertation supervisor, John Bennet, said that throwing in Mayan instead of Sumerian would probably be interesting, and he wasn't wrong). I would have loved more focus on language in my course, but archaeology is a fairly heavily interdisciplinary subject so you get a lot of "the material culture suggests this, fragmentary DNA evidence suggests this, modern language distribution and evidence from historical linguistics suggest this, what conclusions can we draw from all of that", so I understand that linguistics wasn't going to be a big focus at a BA level

I wanted to go on to do an MA in Cognitive Studies, which would have included some modules in linguistics and sociology, on top of archaeology, but I went down a different route. So, honestly, most of my background in linguistics has been a long-term hobby that, like a lot of people here, started very young (of the "tried to learn Language A, but got distracted by Languages B, then again by Language C, variety), with only a hint of academics mixed in. Given the chance, I'd happily go back and do more

[Visions1]

I got started in linguistics by being brought up with exposure to a second language, and my maternal grandmother complimenting me for pronouncing /ʒ/ correctly I think. I started into phonology, which was my gateway drug.

Fast forwards (these aren't in order), I've read a grammar and scanned some papers, almost finished a few books, downed the wine of Wikipedia like all the soul-weary here, and become proficient in said second language. I work part-time as a translator (which also provides lots of worldbuilding ideas). And no it is not nearly as professional as you think.

[WizardOfWar]

I had it recommended in my YouTube feed a few years ago, Now i'm here