Applied Linguistics Past and Future

When I began studying linguistics in the latter part of the 1950s, I was taught that applied linguistics was an integral part of linguistics proper. Some of the leading linguists who gave presentations at the annual meetings of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) and published articles in its journal, Language, discussed how they applied the linguistic principles that all linguists shared about practical, real-world issues such as language learning and teaching. The applications of linguistic knowledge was important enough for some to even become elected as president of the LSA. Many linguists back then worked on the phonological and grammatical structure of different languages, the historical changes in languages, and the regional variation in languages, but applying this knowledge to everyday life was considered equally important. My own career choice was dialectology, which offered a distinct application of language variation to social concerns such as history, politics, geography, migration, and urban/rural conflicts. Later I expanded my interest to sociolinguistics, which has built-in applications to many other social issues, including racial discrimination, employment patterns, and education. Being a linguistic ‘missionary’ was important to me from the beginning, as it was to many others.