So you are a linguist ...
When people ask me what I do for a living and I tell them I'm a linguist, they usually ask "So what languages do you speak?" I tend not to bother them with a full answer to this question, assuming they may regret having asked if I did, but I think this may be a good opportunity to finally do so. My native language is Polish. This is the language my parents taught me, the language in which I learnt how to read and write, and pretty much the only language I spoke until I was 13. At that age, I found myself in Germany (long story) and continued my life in German. English was a language that my school teachers discouraged me from attempting to learn, declaring me too old to be able to catch up with my fellow students.
I ended up studying English at university, writing a PhD in English and moving to England, where I now work as Lecturer in English Language & Applied Linguistics.
As to the other languages ... thanks to the German education system, I completed my Abitur with a workable knowledge of French, some knowledge of Spanish and a Latinum. This made it surprisingly easy to pick up Italian, though I never studied it formally. I then studied Russian and Czech at university and am currently in the process of getting friendly with Greek, though my vocabulary mainly consists of words that my Greek friends don't know how to say in English.
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As a linguist, I don't really get to speak these languages much. As a linguist, I spend a lot of time plodding through linguistic data - whether it's quantitative data, where I'd be coding thousands of speech acts and comparing them across different languages, or qualitative data, such as video-recordings, where I may spend 2 hours transcribing a 20 second sequence. And although I admit that there are more exciting things in life than linguistics, I do find the culture-specific patterns that emerge from my data quite intriguing - as much as I enjoy extracting fine details from mundane conversations, especially those that the interactants do not seem to be aware of themselves.
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