1. What’s your story? How did you get into all these languages?

Where I didn’t get them was in school. I studied only Mandarin for all four years of high school, but I can barely get by in it today. English is my first language and Spanish I absorbed by osmosis growing up in New York City as a curious kid. I got myself to the point where I could work in Spanish academically and read and write poetry after my ear for Romance languages was trained through my study of Latin, which I started after college. Italian was a natural follow-up and great fun once I had Spanish and Latin, and that was helped along by distant memories of a few years of middle school Italian classes in Bensonhurst, where I made the unusual choice to study Italian because it was the neighborhood language and, like all middle schoolers, I was desperate to make friends. I started German in 2019 in an immersion program at Middlebury College in an overachiever’s approach to passing my PhD translation exam in the language and fell completely in love with it: I went back to the program for 5 more summers and just completed my MA in German this past summer. I had heard bits and pieces of French in summers in Canada with my grandparents as a child, but I got serious about it a few years ago when I decided my PhD dissertation would be on a Frenchman in the Early Modern period and I needed to read both antiquated French documents from back then and the current research literature on my author. Esperanto? That’s purely for fun and my most recent new language: it feels like a mountain of dopamine-shot Easter eggs since I have a background in several European languages that influenced it (too) heavily.

2. Which language(s) do you wish you could spend more time practising?

I miss Spanish and Italian. My other languages I use almost daily, between research, teaching, and chats with international friends. But Italian, especially, is a language I have great memories in that I’ve let lie dormant for years now except for some Netflix and podcast binging.

3. What are some languages you’d like to learn in the future?

I want to tackle some non Indo-European languages for a mind-stretching challenge. To that end, I’ve been learning Classical Arabic on and off and recently got serious about Biblical Hebrew, again in my weird spoken-immersion way for classical languages. My inner word nerd loves the unique triliteral root system of Semitic languages. I also want to pick ASL back up: it was the first language I learned a bit of after English, starting when I was 4 years old, because my mom was working in Deaf communities and wanted someone to practice with.

4. So let’s be honest, which language has the most charm for you?

Ohh, I hate this question in general. I think the language with the most charm for an individual is the one you have the richest relationships and ability to express your full self in, and for me that’s German.

5. What’s the greatest pleasure you get from speaking so many languages?

Doing so breaks down the limits of my world. Professionally, I can take account of important and exciting scholarship outside the Anglophone world. Personally, I have a way bigger pool of people I can make friends with. And my brain lights up with all the fun facts about words and their histories that I get to discover every day.

6. Some people say the world is really just going to have a few languages left in a 100 years, do you think this is really true?

No way! I get the impulse behind the statement and there are certainly languages that are in danger of being lost. But people will always be born and grow up in some locality and globalization can’t erase the local. I also think the Internet and things like video, even as they accelerate linguistic homogenization, can be powerful tools for education in less commonly taught languages. Even in my 15 years of serious language learning, I’ve seen resources made easily and freely available for all sorts of languages, whereas when I started it was mostly materials for the most commonly taught languages that were available to me in the US.

7. What is your message to young (and not so young) people out there who are interested in studying multiple languages?

Absolutely anyone who wants to can do it. It’s not a genius feat—most of the world is quite multilingual! It takes work, but it’s the most fun work I know, and it can bring you the great gift of friends from all places and all walks of life.