21 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 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. 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. ALL OKLAHOMANS LIKE ‘FIXIN’ TO,’ EVEN THOSE FANCY PANTS SMART ALECKS IN TULSA. THEY ALL SAY ‘FIXIN’ TO’ … ‘FIXIN’ TO’ SEEMS TO BE A MATTER OF STATE PRIDE. Matt Elliott WORDS Gary Lawson PHOTOGRAPHY
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