What am I doing?

I want to believe I'm ready. I want to. When I get nervous, I try and steel my nerves and at least say to myself, "Well, you already bought the tickets. No going back now."

This is my blog about doing linguistic fieldwork in the Kamchatka. Soon. Like, next week soon. I suppose I should introduce myself a little bit and what the heck I'm doing. I'm Di, and I'm a grad student at UC Santa Barbara. I study the indigenous languages of Siberia, and I look at language change over time (historical linguistics). I did my undergrad degree at the University of Michigan... and thus I am now and forever a Wolverine. Hence the title. Get it? Because wolverines live in Siberia? The language (or dialect group - this distinction is kinda sorta looking like my dissertation topic) I'll be working on is called Koryak. Supposedly there's about (only) 3,000 speakers of various dialects left, and I'm going to working to help document these varieties of the language. The URL is (or rather, is my best guess at) Koryak for 'Michigan Wolverine'. The best English transliteration is 'nuh-Michigan-uh-kin kapay' (or in IPA: /nəmitʃiɣanəqin qapaj/). We'll see if this pans out.

In subsequent posts I'll write a little bit about Koryak and other Kamchatkan languages, as well as the Kamchatka itself.

It has been the biggest nightmare to get my three-year, multi-entry scientific-technical visa to Russia. Such a nightmare it practically gives me PTSD flashbacks to talk about it, so I won't bore you with the details. Ed Snowden got a visa quicker than I did. However, it's good for three years and I can kind of come or go as I please.

My biggest worry right now is my Russian. I have good days and bad days, where my listening is good, but my speaking is trash; where my speaking is fine, but I can't understand anything. I've heard the folks where I'm going are easygoing and pretty chill about this part, and I feel like I can explain my immediate linguistic work well enough. Let's... hope that last sentence is true.

Last but not least, can we have a round of applause for friends and networks? Goodness knows I wouldn't be where I am right now, with these opportunities and all, without some of the most wonderful folks in existence. I gotta thank Kate and her fiance Andrey for their invaluable help in physically obtaining my visa. Yulia, who wrote my letter of invitation and gave it such forethought and endured "my" panicked phone calls first thing in her morning, is someone who I owe this trip to. And of course there is Alex, who basically told me who to call, how to get there, what to say, how to do everything, and pretty much everything else. Literally. And a big thanks to the UCSB Linguistics department for the partial funding they gave me. I have a zillion other folks who need to be thanked too, and I'm not any less grateful for anyone not immediately listed.