Double Take -- by Mark Sproxton

Like the explorers from days of old, linguists specializing in phonology prepare for a world of discoveries. Scrutinizing the elements of a little researched language, these language experts seldom know exactly what they'll find. Just as every person is different from the next, so are languages.

"We're discovering something that's innately human," explained Darin Howe, a linguistics professor specializing in phonology, First Nation languages and sociolinguistics, at the University of Calgary. "That's very exciting for researchers." It's like completing a crossword puzzle, he added, finding the unusual mix of sound patterns, things like rhythm, pitch and stress and other quirks humans have introduced to a language.

Like most linguists, Howe teaches full-time. And also like most linguists, he spends a great deal of his time using his knowledge and abilities to conduct research. "The real fun part of academic life is the teaching," Howe said. "When you are researching, you're focussing on narrow issues and you're not always able to ask some of the bigger questions students are able to ask."

That's not to say he doesn't have an endless amount of enthusiasm for his research projects. When not teaching or preparing for classes, he's currently developing a Blackfoot language course, has a student working on the Stoney language in Morley and is helping to gather information for children's books to be translated into the Tssut'ina language.

"All are laid out completely differently," Howe said. "All are unrelated. Tssut'ina is a tonal language like Chinese which makes it complicated. These are not languages I've worked on before. There are so many, just because you have worked on one doesn't mean you have an advantage working in another."

He has worked on several other First Nations languages, but those exist primarily along Canada's west coast close to the University of British Columbia where Howe completed his PhD. While the professor thoroughly enjoys his career choice, he says there is an unfortunate side to linguistics.

"The worst thing is language is something people take for granted. People don't have a sense of what linguists do. People think you just study another language. The typical question is: 'How many languages do you speak?' People don't have a sense of how complex a language is."

Ironically, a lot of linguistics is mathematical. "Through my training I've learned a lot of phonetics," he said. "You learn what types of sound sequences are in the language." And after learning these minute details of a language, along with a person's particular language features, such as jargon used in ordinary conversation, Howe said it's possible in some cases to accurately predict where that person is from. And then the exploration for something new continues again.