Preston's 50-Year Love Affair
Thursday, January 27, 2011
Photos by Gary Lawson
Oklahoma is a state of contrasts, says linguist Dennis Preston, but “fixin’ to” is
the great equalizer.
“All Oklahomans like ‘fixin’ to,’” says Preston, with a twinkle in his eye, “even
those fancy pants smart alecks in Tulsa. They all say ‘fixin’ to.’ They wouldn’t say
‘pin’ and ‘pen’ the same if you paid them. And they certainly wouldn’t say things
like ‘might could’ and a lot of other southernisms Oklahomans use, but ‘fixin’ to’
seems to be a matter of state pride.”
OSU named Preston a Regents Professor in 2009 for his work delving into the “fixin’
to’s” of the world of sociolinguistics and dialects. In fact, his telling of its history
is a good explanation of what he does at OSU.
The linguist, who has spent nearly 50 years in his field, studies how people talk
and uses sociology, ethnography, history and psychology to weave a tapestry that depicts
peoples’ movements over time. The movement of “fixin’ to” from rural Oklahoma to urban
areas shows in part how populations moved within the state during the last 65 years.
“Before 1945, there was no presence in Oklahoma of ‘fixin’ to’ in the urban areas,”
Preston says. “It was only in the countryside. Normally, what happens is it goes from
the city to the country. Here, it’s been just the opposite.”
Preston came to OSU in 2008 wanting his own research program, bored after retiring
from Michigan State University, where he spent 17 years as a sociolinguist and dialectologist.
That’s the latest chapter in what has been a long love affair with words.
Growing up in Harrisburg, Ill., his dad’s side of the family was from Hungary, and
his grandmother didn’t speak English. His mom’s family, his “hillbilly side,” was
full of coal miners from the Louisville, Ky., area.
He moved around at different colleges for a few years, receiving his bachelor’s degree
in 1962 from the University of Louisville. By 1969, he had his doctoral degree from
the University of Wisconsin-Madison and began his career teaching at Ohio State. Several
university teaching jobs later, he has learned no less than eight languages, including
Polish, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Italian, English Caribbean Creole and Xhosa (the
Bantu dialect prominent in South Africa) and a perfect Louisville dialect, but adds
he doesn’t sound like “Li’l Abner.”
At OSU, he’s working on a grant with the Research Institute for the Languages of
Finland to study language among Helsinki residents. However, his main project is something
he calls RODEO, or Research on the Dialects of English in Oklahoma, with a former
student and Langston University professor Darnell Williams.
Previous projects in the state have ignored blacks, Native Americans and certain
immigrant populations in Oklahoma, he says, including Oklahoma’s Czech descendants.
His drive is to catalog their dialects and understand how they fit in the state’s
language picture.
“Blacks in Oklahoma have been completely ignored in previous dialect work, both in
urban and rural areas. There’s not one minute of tape of residents from the traditional
black towns of Oklahoma. It’s also unthinkable in Oklahoma that there’s been no study
of what traditional Native American English sounds like.”
Although he’s dedicated to his research, he keeps lifelong ties with many of his
former students, who end up becoming friends as well as protégés. Terumi Imai, a Japanese
linguist, studied under Preston (whom some of his former students call “Grampaw”)
at MSU, and she credits his guidance with helping her obtain her doctoral degree in
2004. She and other former students regularly send him their articles and research
for his feedback, and he’s always willing to help. She says they all reconnect each
year at the annual Linguistic Society of America conference.
“He taught me a lot of things,” says Imai, now a professor at Wittenberg University,
a liberal arts college in Springfield, Ohio. “I learned from him how to be a good
mentor to students. When I first came to MSU, I was getting my master’s in semantics,
but his sociolinguistics class was eye opening. I never knew that it was so deep and
had such a great influence over people’s lives.”
Preston received the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Polish Republic,
an Erskine Fellowship at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand,
and the Paul Varg Arts & Letters Alumni Association Distinguished Faculty Award from
Michigan State University’s College of Arts & Letters. He is also a Fellow of the
Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.
This story originally ran in the 2010 College of Arts & Sciences magazine.