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My name is Kirk--I am currently in my fourth and final year at
UC San Diego and am a
Linguistics major. I'm interested in quite a range of eclectic topics. In 2004 (during part of my third year) I studied abroad in amazing
Buenos Aires,
Argentina, and have subsequently been bitten by the "travel bug." One of my interests related to linguistics is a constant fascination with how people speak, and more specifically,
phonetics/
phonology and
regional variation within certain
languages. This interest is reflected in my first wikipedia article,
California English.
I was born in
Chicago, but three months later my family moved to
Selah, Washington, a small town near
Yakima where I lived till I was 5. Then I lived in
Euless, Texas a town in the middle of the large
Dallas-Forth Worth metro area till I was 11. Since then I've lived in
California, and I've just recently considerably updated and expanded the article on
Turlock, California where I lived from the age of 11-18, and where my family still lives. I am a current resident of
San Diego, California. My roommate from this past year and good friend
T.J., is also a wikipedia addict.
Interests
As I said before, I'm very interested in human language, and have studied
Spanish,
French, and
Korean. One reason for my continued interest in Korean is that I've considered teaching English in
Seoul,
South Korea, although I'm not sure if/when I'd end up doing that. My current interest in post-UCSD jobs would involve something where I get to deal with languages/linguistics. This past fall I took my first
German and loved it. I plan on taking it for the rest of my time here at UCSD. I've been trying to teach myself
Swedish by reading some books on it, so I can read moderate amounts of it; hopefully one day I'll be able to speak it.
Background
I'm an American of varied
Northern European descent--my forebears were
Swedes,
Ulster Scots-Irish, as well as
English and
French via
Canada. My mom's parents were born and raised in Canada (my grandma from the province of
Alberta and my grandpa from
British Columbia). As adults they immigrated to
San Jose, California, where my mom was born. My dad's mom (so, my grandma) was born in
Minnesota to her Swedish immigrant father (from
Karlstad) and her mother who was a first-generation US-born
Swedish American. They all moved to California in the end of my grandma's teenage years, where my grandma met and married my grandpa, who was originally from
Chattanooga, Tennessee but had moved to
San Jose, California, as well.