Welcome!

Hello and welcome to my blog! I'm new to this sort of thing and I have never followed any blogs, which is why my first posts might look a bit clumsy. Here it goes.

A few words about me
My name is Maciek (more or less 'mah-chek for those unfamiliar with the IPA). I was born in Gdynia, Poland, in 1982, a native speaker of Polish. I teach linguistics and English as a foreign language at the University of Gdańsk, Poland, where I studied from 2001 until 2006 and obtained my Master's degree in English. I also spent one year teaching adults at a private language school and two years running a translation agency, which sadly succumbed to the voracious economic crisis. I'm now (September 2012) at an important stage in my professional life: I have finished the text of my PhD dissertation and need to pass several exams to prove I'm a bona fide linguist. I'm interested in sociolinguistics and I love British English like some people love French or Italian; needless to say, my thesis is about British English and sociolinguistics. I'll describe my thesis in greater detail if I manage to become a PhD - I don't want to count my chickens before they're hatched, you see.

My linguistic 'anoraks'
In no particular order: language attitudes and their influence on common usage; Standard British English; RP and the speech of English aristocrats; Standard Polish; 'correct' language: who decides, how and why; purists and why they think one dialect is better than another; arguing against linguists who are purists (and there are quite a few of those left); TEFL, in particular teaching advanced English to adults; teaching British English phonetics, which I haven't done yet; translation, to which I'd like to return part-time in the future; Kashubian, the local language spoken in addition to Polish by a sizeable community in Pomerania (but not me).

My favourite linguists
Jean Aitchison, Laurie Bauer, Deborah Cameron, David Crystal, John McWhorter, James Milroy, Lesley Milroy, Jan Miodek, Peter Trudgill, Ronald Wardaugh