Remembering Barbara Horvath

Editor’s note: The Australian linguistics community mourns the recent passing of pioneering sociolinguist Barbara Horvath. To honor her memory, we are here publishing the lightly edited transcript of an oral history interview that our very own Livia Gerber did with Barbara in 2017. The interview was commissioned by the Australian Linguistic Society as part of a larger oral history project on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the founding of the society.

In the interview, Barbara reflects on the early years of her career as an American linguist in Australia in the 1970s, and how linguistics and language in Australia have changed since then.

The transcript was edited by Brynn Quick.

Update 23/09/2024: The audio is now available here or on your podcast app of choice.

 

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Livia: So, you’re very difficult to google and to do background research on!

Barbara: Really?! Whenever I look myself up, I start finding me all over the place (laughs).

Livia: I did find a couple of things about you, like the fact that you had actually studied in Georgetown and Michigan, and that you came over to Sydney in the 1970s. Then I was astounded to find that you were the second linguist at University of Sydney. It was just you and Michael Halliday.

Barbara: Yes, but he only got there a couple of months before me. It was the birth of the Linguistics Department.

Livia: Can you tell me a little bit about what it was like when the field was so young?

Barbara: Well, I guess the answer to the story is that my husband got a job here. He’s a geographer, and we were in Vancouver at the time in Canada. He was teaching at Simon Fraser, and I was teaching at the University of British Columbia. We were both lucky, those were both just jobs for a year or two. I was writing my dissertation at that point.

So, we started applying, and he applied to the University of Sydney, and he got the job! And I applied, and I was told by a number of people at the University of British Columbia, linguists, that I didn’t have a chance. That there was no chance, it was only going to be one other person hired. And Michael, you know had a wife, Ruqaiya Hassan, and everybody was sure that Ruqaiya would get the other job. So, I didn’t have very much hope, but then I got the job!

I was just so amazed that I got the job, and I found out from Michael later that it turned out that the reason I got the job is, he was very interested in starting a department that would combine both systemics and Labovian kinds of sociolinguistics. He thought somehow we’d be able to mesh in an interesting kind of way, having different interests and different ways of configuring what the major issues were.

But we had great overlaps because I was just as interested in applied linguistics, and Michael certainly was and wanted to build a department up as a place for both theoretical and applied interests. So, it was that it was very exciting times for us when we did both get jobs at the same university which didn’t seem like that was going to be possible at all, but it was!

Livia: How long were you at Sydney for?

Barbara: Until I retired. It was my only place until I retired in 1980-something or 1990-something. I know I retired early because in those days women could retire at 55, so it was when I turned 55 that I retired. But after that is when I got more interested in working with a friend of mine in Louisiana, and we worked together for 10 or 12 years after that.

Livia: You’re also a female scholar who migrated to Australia. How did that shape your research or your role as a researcher?

Barbara: I don’t know that being a female shaped my research. I was much more interested in social issues. The time when I was doing my master’s and PhD were times of great upheaval with the anti-Vietnam war situation. I spent some time in my master’s degree working with Mexican children in California. I collected data there, and so it was more an interest in social issues.

I found the linguistics of theoretical people like Chomsky, for instance, very interesting. I found that the kinds of questions and the way he was doing linguistics was so different from writing grammars of language, for instance, which was the main thing that linguists were doing at that point, describing languages that hadn’t been described. I didn’t mind that either, but I was really taken in by the more political sides of things, and so when Labov first published his dissertation which was only when I was still at the master’s level, I just thought, Oh! This is what I want. This brings social issues and linguistics together.

I thought he was asking questions about how language changes, and I was very interested in that as a theoretical question. If it was going on before and it’s going on now, can you observe it changing? And when they came up with these nice statistical means and then the data necessary for using those statistical means to look at language changes, I found that theoretically exciting.

Livia: So, did you have a very big research team helping you when you first did the nearly 200 interviews in the Sydney?

Barbara: No, no, no! Not at all. I mean, that story is kind of funny. When I came here and it was only Michael and me, I had no idea about how the university worked. It was very different from American universities. I didn’t know how different it was. Michael was much more familiar with it I suspect because of his English background.

I came over here thinking, oh my gosh I have to get tenure because in America you have to get tenure within your first six years or else you’re going to go to some other university. And we had moved all around the world, my husband and I and my two little children. When we get to Sydney we thought, we’re just going to stay there. We’re not going to move at all. So, then I thought I’ve got to get busy, so I applied for a grant to do New York City all over again, except in Sydney.

That first year we collected the data from the Anglos. The Italians and the Greeks were in the third year. So, the first year Anne Snell and I collected all the data (chuckles) and made the preliminary transcripts. I think we had money for getting transcripts typed, and we had money for Anne and me to run around all over Sydney trying to get interviews with people. Then Anne and I sat together in my living room at the end of the data collection period just listening to the tapes and checking with each other if we were all hearing the same thing.

Then I found out afterwards that there is no such thing as tenure. If they hire you, they hire you, and they’re not going to think about getting rid of you. Oh! All that work I did! It was very funny.

It was when my supervisor from Georgetown, Roger Shuy, came over for participating in a conference. He said, “Barbara, I’m going to ask Michael how you’re doing.” And I said, “Ok.” He asked Michael did he think I’d get tenure, and Michael said something like, “I don’t know! I don’t think they do tenure here.” (laughs). Oh dear!

So anyway, I was working really hard. I thought I needed to, but I think I would’ve done it anyway. I definitely have no regrets. I’m glad we worked that hard, but it did mean coming home from teaching at the university – because most of the interviews were done at night, they were done after people had dinner – so Anne and I both got home, fed our families, turned around, got in a car and went off somewhere.

Livia: So, let’s talk about your data. You had a lot of data. I read a quote of yours somewhere where you said it was amazing how much variation there was, and that you were really excited about that.

I actually went to the Powerhouse Museum yesterday, and I looked at the Sydney Speaks app. I didn’t get all of the questions right! One of the teaching points in the app was that unless you live and grew up in Sydney, you’re not likely to get a lot of these right. So, for you, who didn’t grow up in Sydney, as an initial outsider, I’m sure the language variation would have been fascinating for you to learn about, as well as all the social aspects behind it. There are differences in society despite the classlessness that Australia prides itself in.

Barbara: Yeah, and again, you know, I came over here totally understanding that what I was seeing was social class. I mean it’s just social class as far as I’m concerned. It wasn’t that much different except certain ethnicities were different and all that sort of thing.

I looked for the sociology in it, and I though ok I’ll do like Labov did. He just found a sociologist, and he just used whatever categories the sociologist did! I found one tiny article from the University of New South Wales, and it just wasn’t that useful, so in a way I kind of had to figure out for myself what I thought. In the book I talk about how you come up against problems, like for example you have somebody who owns a milk bar, you know, in terms of the working class-or the middle class or whatever. So, you know, I think the class thing is fraught, and it’s still fraught today. It’s not well defined, though it’s better defined than it used to be.

Livia: And in general, there are ideas about the categories we imagine that people fall into. There are so many assumptions and myths out there.

Barbara: Absolutely, but then even when you decide that somebody is either Italian, Greek or Anglo, even those titles are complicated. Very many people didn’t like me using the term Anglo because they would rather be called Australians. That’s the way people were talking about it then, that there were Australians, Italians and Greeks.

But I remember one Scottish person said how insulted he was to be put in with the Anglos. I said well I suppose you are, come to think of it. So yeah, it was kind of fraught. It’s not the easiest thing in the world to do, to come in as a real foreigner, and not really knowing very much about Australia at all before we came and then trying to jump in to something like this.

I guess the thing that helped a lot is anybody who I hired were Australians, so they could um tell me when I was really going off the rails. I felt more comfortable with the Greeks and the Italians because they were foreigners like me, so they had different ways of understanding Australia as well.

Livia: That’s fascinating, especially considering in sociolinguistics at the moment that researcher positionality is a very big topic and having to justify your own positionality and reflect on your influence in the interview.

Barbara: Yes, but you know I don’t understand how we would ever do studies of other peoples if we only had ourselves to look at, that is if everybody else was just like you. First of all, I wouldn’t have found very many Americans of my particular background, so I think you have to be cautious about these things.

But what I also think is that when you do a kind of statistical analysis in the way that I did, and when you see the patterns that resolve, you think something is generating those patterns. It’s probably the social aspects as well as the linguistic aspects. You need to always be conscious of what you’re doing, as I was, with class. I knew I had no right to be assigning class to people because not even, you know, Marxists do that. Even though they believe in class, absolutely, they don’t go along classifying people. They talk about members of the working class, but it’s kind of a broad sweeping hand kind of thing.

So, in terms of picking up on the linguistic variable that I looked at, I really depended upon Mitchell and Delbridge and their work before me. So, we knew the vowels were very important in Australian English. If you look at Labov’s work, vowels are the most likely changing features of a language, and then of course certain consonants come up as well.

Livia: You just brought up Arthur Delbridge. Let’s talk a little bit about your colleagues over the years, particularly also the colleagues you’ve met through the Australian Linguistic Society (ALS). Could you maybe tell me a little bit about your involvement with the ALS?

Barbara: I’m sure that I attended some ALS meetings from whenever I got here to whenever I left! But I didn’t attend after I retired. I don’t recall going to too many meetings, but early on it was a small group of people, as you can imagine. It was Delbridge and I’m not sure who else, but Delbridge for sure was a major person in the early stage in getting the whole thing going as far as I know.

It was a small group of people, a very friendly group of people who got together. It was the first time that I saw a group of students or university people who were interested in Aboriginal languages because we didn’t really have that in Sydney at first until Michael Walsh joined the faculty. So, I realised that, at least among young people, there was really the enthusiasm for Australian linguistics.

The meetings were always held at some university. We always lived in the dormitories together, so it was, you know, breakfast, lunch and dinner with a very friendly group of people. And there were good papers. You could listen to papers on Aboriginal languages, for instance, that I wasn’t getting from any other place, so that that was all very interesting.

When I first came here, John Bernard was very helpful to me, and I used his work as well on vowels in Australian English. Those were very fundamental. If I hadn’t had those as a base, I could not have done my work as quickly as I did, but because they’d worked on that for a long time, it was very helpful.

I also remember the systemics people, Jim Martin and Michael (Halliday), coming, and they had a harder time because I think there weren’t a sufficient number of them. There was Ruqaiya and Michael and Jim at first, but eventually, as you know, they got a sufficient number of people, and then they became very, very big.

Then it became the really, the major direction in the department. By the time I left, it was not the only direction. They would go on to certainly hire more people who are in sociolinguistics. Two or three different Americans came over to work, and others like Ingrid (Piller). So yeah, it’s expanded and now it’s a very different department from what it was when I was there.

The department was really small for those first ten or twelve years. We were very close. We used to plan weekends together where, you know, we’d go at the end of the year and we’d go off camping! We’d go somewhere together. The graduate students and the staff just did things together, and that was very nice. So, you made very warm relationships with many people who came from that era. Maybe it’s still the same way. It may still be wonderful.

When Michael Walsh came, it was important for him to come because we were getting to look like we weren’t an “Australian” bunch of people, so when Michael came at least he legitimised us because he was working on Aboriginal languages. He was an Australian, so we all learned how to be Australian from Michael.

Livia: Whatever “Australian” means nowadays, right? (laughs)

Barbara: Yeah, whatever that means. Well, I think of myself as practically Australian now, but nobody else does, so (laughs) that’s just the way it is.

Livia: What’s it like for you walking around, say, Glebe now and hearing all the variation in Australian English? Do you get very excited when you hear people speaking?

Barbara: I don’t think I want to go and do another study, no! No, no. I still like to listen. I feel that there’s some things that I could have pursued, and perhaps I should’ve. I’ve always felt, I keep telling this to every sociolinguist I ever meet in Australia, and that is that somebody needs to study the Lebanese community. The Lebanese community is going to be very, very interesting, and of course if you don’t capture it really soon, you know, it will –

Livia: Has no one done that?

Barbara: No, not really. I know of no major study now. Maybe somebody’s done it a little bit here and there, but I think that would be fascinating to study, so I keep trying to urge people to study the Lebanese community.

Livia: That’s interesting because they’re a fairly recent migrant group but not that recent.

Barbara: No, not that recent. They were when I when I was doing my studies. The Greeks and the Italians were the major groups that anybody ever talked about, so when you were talking about migrants you meant the Greeks and the Italians. But the Lebanese were becoming a force, particularly if you were doing applied linguistic work. If you were working with the schools, the most recent group to migrate in large numbers were the Lebanese. So, I felt even then that I couldn’t face doing another major work like that again. But every time we did get a new sociolinguist, I told them that they should be studying the Lebanese community.

Livia: Too bad I’m nearly finished with my thesis (both laugh). But to take you back to the ALS conference days – what do you remember of those?

Barbara: Bearing in mind I haven’t been to a meeting in many years, what I recall of them is that most of the papers were interesting. I do recall the social aspects of it, getting together with groups of people who are linguists and just talking among yourselves. That, to me, is the best part about meetings all together. Unless it’s somebody who’s absolutely giving a paper right on what you’re interested because then you’re just kind of sitting there absorbing and thinking. But actually talking to people, especially because, as I said, we were a small group at that point, so it was very personal and interactional. That’s the main thing that I think about when I think about the ALS.

Livia: I’m always told when you go to conferences that it’s good to be criticised or challenged in your ideas, or that out of failure come new ideas. I’m just wondering whether you recall a time when that happened to you, that you were maybe challenged in your ideas but that actually ultimately took you in a direction that was more fruitful?

Barbara: I think people treated me very well, so I don’t recall any criticism. No, there was criticism when my book first came out, but it was well-intended. In those days we really didn’t do those things publicly. Everybody was incredibly polite to everyone else, so even if you did think, “oh that was a stupid paper,” you wouldn’t say it, and you wouldn’t embarrass somebody with it. I think you might challenge them later over coffee, but it was a very polite society at that time.

This was unlike some of the American things that you go to where you get somebody in the audience who is just dying to “get you”, you know? That kind of thing was not a nice feeling. People treated me very well, and I know now from looking back that I came over here like a bull in a china shop in the sense of who was I to be coming here and taking on such a big project, and taking it on with the manner and attitude that I had? I know this now because I’ve been here long enough to know how you feel about people who come here, and suddenly they know everything about anything. So, I think I probably stepped on a few toes, partly out of innocence.

One of the reasons I really like Chomsky is that he is argumentative, and I don’t mind a good argument. Not a personal one, not one that’s vindictive or whatever, but I think being strong about what you feel or arguing about what you think is controversial – I think that’s healthy for any field. You need to be able to say, you know, I have a different opinion about that, or I think something else is working here.

I got a really nice letter from John Bernard, for instance, who took me to task for a number of things. He wrote me a very long letter. I appreciated the fact that he had put in all that time to respond. I didn’t necessarily agree with him, but I understood where he was coming from. I guess what I like about John Bernard is that even after that he was always very friendly to me. I never had any problems with him, so I hope he never took whatever I said argumentatively to heart (laughs).

Livia: It’s important to have a good scholarly debate without being personal.

Barbara: Yeah, I think so too. But I can imagine I might have the same reaction if somebody came over and redid my work and they’d only been here three months, and I could say, “What would you know?!” (laughs)

You know, it is true that one of the things was the class issue, that I imposed this class issue. I don’t know that he said I imposed it, but he really did want to make the point that class wasn’t as significant in Australia, and he was still supporting the notion that it was a matter of choice, that you could choose. That was so alien to me, and it is still kind of alien to me.

I think people don’t choose the dialect they speak. I think they speak the dialect they’re brought up in, and that doesn’t mean I don’t think people can’t change their dialect. I think they can if they want to, if they move somewhere else or if they, you know, get a PhD and become professor of Physics or something. I think they can move up and down, up and down. I think that can happen, but it was the word “choose”, I think, that that bothered me a lot. I couldn’t see kids deciding, “oh I’m not going to speak like that anymore,” because they probably haven’t even heard anybody speak any other way except on television, and how much do we get from television? Or radio, or that kind of thing? I don’t think that much. But I just- I came in at that moment, I think, before a lot of people would understand that choosing isn’t probably the right word or the right conception of how dialect changes, that- that you decide to speak a different way. Anyway, that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it! (chuckles)

Livia: Speaking of changes – you’ve been in Australian linguistics for a bit of a while. What are sort of the major changes that you’ve seen happening in the field?

Barbara: I can tell you about my department. There’s much more interest in descriptive language, grammatical description. That’s really very big in the Sydney department. What’s happening in the rest of the department, I’m just not familiar with.

The set up that Michael (Halliday) managed to create in the department is kind of there, but it has a very different flavour. It’s much more anthropological, what I would call anthropological linguistics. So, still interested in people, still interested in culture and language as well, and especially in studying the variety of languages. I think it’s probably a firmer basis for study than sociolinguistics, and even Michael’s kind of sociolinguistics works best, I think, if you’re a native speaker of the language. I mean, why else is it that we get so much work on English? Because it’s kind of an English-based theoretical position. When I go to meetings, I meet lots of people from Europe and various other places who are studying their own languages in a sociolinguistic manner. But anyway, I would be out of place, I think, in the department now because I’d be the only one doing that.

I’ve been going to the seminars this year, and they’re very interesting papers that are being given with a lot of really interesting and new (to me) people in the department. I know this honours student that I was telling you about, that I was mentoring this year. She is so enthusiastic, and yet there isn’t any real place in this department for her to pursue her work. She had to do a lot of work in figuring out how to collect data, how to interpret your own findings after you’ve done the statistical analysis, all that stuff. She had a real task ahead of her, and I’m glad to say that Catherine Travis has picked up some of my work with that.

I don’t know if you know, but I was about to get rid of all my tapes. I downsized about five years ago. I just decided I was going to downsize. I was not going to do any more research, so it was time to just clean up my house, and I came to those tapes that I had saved from all these years ago. I thought, ah I know somebody in the world would like to have these tapes eventually, but they were still on these little cassettes. They needed a lot of work done with them before they’d be useful to anybody anymore, so anyway she got in touch with me. I said to her, by the way if you have any interest at all in my tapes because I’m just about to ditch them – and she wrote back quickly, “Don’t! Don’t! I’ll be up-I’ll come up and pick them up!”. (laughs)

So, she did, and I’m so glad because she really is doing some great work down there. So, I hope my little honours student goes down there to finish her work because I think she’s so enthusiastic.

Livia: Coming back to Sydney Speaks – I was looking through the Sydney Speaks webpage and there seem to be quite a few projects that are reaching a wider population.

Barbara: Yes, there’s lots of stuff. They’re collecting more data. They seem to be interested in ethnic varieties of English, that sort of thing, so yeah! It’s a whole new revitalisation, I think, of the interest in ethnic varieties of English. There are so many new and large migrations that have happened since the Italians. I mean, the Italians and the Greeks – Leichhardt, for instance, it’s not there anymore. You can’t go there and see that whole row of Italian restaurants that you used to find. Now you go to buy your coffee where you’ve always been to buy your coffee, and it does not seem to be run by Italians anymore, that kind of thing. So yeah, no Greeks and Italians.

I think it’s probably the case that you need two generations. You need the parent generation and the teenager (more or less what I did) because I suspect by the time it gets to the third generation, it’s gone. They’re just Aussies, and they speak like Aussies, and you wouldn’t find anything very interesting. So, you’ve got to catch it when it’s there. Timing is everything.

Livia: Are you going to be attending the ALS conference in December? Are you able to make it?

Barbara: No, no, no. I’ve actually not been in linguistics for quite a while now. That’s why I was downsizing, and I had to face it that I hadn’t been doing anything, that’s it! Give it up! Yeah.

Livia: Well, given that the ALS would like some snippets, I was thinking – Are there any wishes you have for the linguistics society moving forward? For their 50^th anniversary?

Barbara: I’m interested in all of these people who are doing the dynamics of language. When I started looking up Catherine and looking up various others and I see all these people are doing something called the dynamics of language. So, what do they mean by that? Well, you know, I doubt they are all Labovians. I guess I’d love to see the group of them getting together in a discussion of just that. What are the dynamics of language that you’re focussing on? What kind of theoretical issues are there? Do you have overlapping goals, or do you have a single set of goals? Does dynamics actually mean language change as it is associated with historical linguistics? Or does it just mean socially dynamic, like other people picking up your language? Or just the use of language? Or how many people still speak Polish? Or is that the dynamics of language? I’d love to see what people are thinking about with the dynamics of language. It’s obviously got people very interested, whatever it is. That’s what I would like I would like to see a discussion of.

Livia: In that vein of wishing things – do you have any advice for PhD and honours students pursuing linguistics?

Barbara: Be passionate about something, and purse that. I was passionate myself for a long time when I did my bachelor’s degree. I knew I wanted to do English and it was all literature. I knew that what I really like is grammar, but I had never heard the word linguistics before. It wasn’t until I went to Ethiopia and I was teaching at Haile Selassie, the first university (now, Addis Ababa University), that I met a group of linguists who had come over there. And I thought oh, Linguistics! That’s what I want to be, you know? Then I really pursued that afterwards, but yeah, find your passion.

I had a very strong kind of social commitment to making a good society, and language is really kind of right in the middle of that.

That’s such an easy cliché, but because, as I said, when I started off, I had a very strong kind of social commitment to making a good society, and language is really kind of right in the middle of that. What I loved about sociolinguistics is that you could easily go in between the more sophisticated theoretical issues as well as being right on the ground and saying here are some problems that we’ve got. How can we think about these things? So, I did a lot of work with schools, and I think being able to interact with your community for me, not everybody, but for me, that was a very important thing.

Livia: Yeah, I agree. I think it’s interesting that language keeps coming up in the media. People are grasping how complex it is, and it has complex social meanings behind it. I mean, most recently we saw this in the citizenship debates of some of the politicians. There were politicians making fun of each other, saying I don’t sound Greek, but everyone always says where are you from, and now I’m the most Aussie in the room.

Barbara: Yeah, absolutely. No, that’s not true of me because I can go to David Jones tomorrow and get up to pay for my goods, and the people will think I’m an American tourist. They’ll ask me how I find Sydney. So, it isn’t true of me. Nobody has ever, ever said that I was an Aussie. (laughs)

Livia: I’ll ask you maybe one last reflective thing. Thinking back to when you first started and you were involved with all these linguists, particularly in the ALS, what advice would you give to yourself?

Barbara: I think, like I said before, it would be about time. I thought I needed to hit the ground running because my kids didn’t want to move to any other place. We didn’t want to move into any other place, so I had to hit the ground running and make sure that I could stay in this position, so that’s what I did. I think if I had known, “oh look, you know, you’re going to be here forever.” Just sort of do it calmly and carefully, and don’t step on any toes. My thing is, yes, take your time with something, but when you first start, you don’t know how much time you’ve got. Anyway, that’s just an excuse.

My thing is, yes, take your time with something, but when you first start, you don’t know how much time you’ve got

Livia: I can imagine. I mean, I’m in a very big department now at Macquarie, and so being particularly around as linguistics students, we’re socialised into the way the university works and what’s expected of us very quickly. But if you’re one of two in a linguistics department that would’ve been extremely confronting.

Barbara: Yes, and I mean it was hard enough for us to figure out everything with us, meaning Michael (Halliday) and me. Where are you going to be coming from? Where am I? He’s always an open sort of person. If you said, “oh I’m going to talk about this, that or the other thing,” he would never say anything negative. He was very open and so there wasn’t a lot of direction there either, so I just took my own direction in a hurry. (laughs)

Livia: And it’s still making waves today!

Barbara: Still making waves today!

Livia: Well, that’s it. It’s been nice! Was there anything else you wanted to add?

Barbara: I think I’ve said it all. (laughs)

References

For a full list see Barbara’s Google Scholar profile.

Horvath, B. M. (1985). Variation in Australian English: the sociolects of Sydney. Cambridge University Press.

Horvath, B. M. (1991). Finding a place in Sydney: migrants and language change. In S. Romaine (Ed.), Language in Australia (pp. 304-317). Cambridge University Press.

Horvath, B. M., & Horvath, R. J. (2001). A multilocality study of a sound change in progress: The case of /l/ vocalization in New Zealand and Australian English. Language Variation and Change, 13, 37–57.

Horvath, B. M., & Sankoff, D. (1987). Delimiting the Sydney Speech Community. Language in Society, 16(2), 179-204.

Mitchell, A. G., & Delbridge, A. (1965). The pronunciation of English in Australia. Angus and Robertson.

Mitchell, A. G., & Delbridge, A. (1965). The speech of Australian adolescents. Angus and Robertson.