Janalyn Miklas is a PhD student in Linguistics. She has traveled the world as both a teacher and a musician. In 2024, she received a Critical Language Scholarship through the U.S. Department of State to complete a full-immersion language learning program in Ankara, Türkiye. She has published papers in Working Papers in Language and Linguistics and in Proceedings of Meetings on
Acoustics. She has been performing professionally as a musician, specifically on the harmonica, since 2010 and also plays the flute, piccolo, piano and oboe.
She currently works as a Graduate Writing Coordinator in the Writing Center and holds a B.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies: TESL and Global Studies, Linguistics from Liberty University and a M.A. in Linguistics from George Mason University.
In this five-question interview, she shared with us how travel, music, and her experiences teaching have shaped her research as well as what she loves about linguistics.
1. How have your travels influenced your approach to your own studies?
Traveling, especially participating in language immersion programs, has greatly inspired my approach to learning. I absolutely love learning about various cultures, worldviews, and perspectives. During my bachelor’s degree, I had the opportunity to teach English in South Korea for a summer and complete a semester-long language immersion and teaching internship in Thailand. After my second year of the PhD, I was selected as a Critical Language Scholar to participate in a summer-long language immersion program in Türkiye. By immersing myself in different cultures and languages, I learned how to approach learning from multiple directions. As a researcher, being able to examine information and evaluate scholarship from various frames of reference has been invaluable. It challenges me to critically analyze my work, from the methodological choices that I make to the overarching connections and implications of my results.
2. What topic are you pursuing for your thesis, and what inspired you to choose this topic?
My dissertation is looking at the acoustic features of the “r” sound in Turkish and assessing the variability in pronunciation amongst native and non-native Turkish speakers. In Turkish, there are acoustic differences in how the “r” sounds depending on where it is in the word and what other sounds are around it. Amongst native speakers, we can observe pronunciation differences, especially across regional dialects of Turkish. We often see even more variation with non-native speakers due to pronunciation influence from their first language. The inspiration for this project initially came from listening to a Turkish book on my morning commute to GMU. I noticed that when “r” came at the end of a word it sounded different from “r” at the beginning or in the middle of the word. When I got to campus that day, I immediately started searching for studies that analyze the pronunciation of the Turkish “r”. To my surprise, there were very few studies about it, and even fewer on non-native Turkish speech. As a non-native Turkish speaker, I wanted to know why, when, and how the “r” changes acoustically and contribute to the scholarship on non-native speech production.
3. How does your experience as a GMU Graduate Teaching Assistant influence your approach to learning?
Ever since I was in high school, I have always felt that I understood a concept better if I could teach it to someone else. Being a Graduate Teaching Assistant has reinforced my learning philosophy by providing me opportunities to teach students from various knowledge backgrounds. Having to differentiate my instruction to meet the needs of my students helps me have a deeper understanding of my field by examining linguistic concepts from multiple perspectives and explaining them for various purposes.
4. You attended Mason for your Master's as well. What’s been your favorite class you’ve taken at Mason over the years? Why?
There have been many classes that I have enjoyed during my time at Mason, but I think my favorite was Field Methods. For this class, our professor chose an understudied language and brought in a native speaker to teach us about the language. As a gift, we worked together to write children’s books in the language for his newborn. This class taught me that linguistic fieldwork is much more than collecting data for a project but creates opportunities to establish relationships, learn collaboratively, and give back to the community.
5. How does your love for music interact with your study of linguistics?
Growing up, my family instilled in me a love of music. Both of my parents are classically trained musicians. At the age of 10, I made my debut as a professional musician with my dad’s harmonica trio. Since then, I have performed with my dad domestically and abroad. I loved music so much that I considered pursuing a doctorate in music, like my dad, but then I discovered my passion for learning languages. From my perspective, language and music are not that different. I strongly believe that my love of music inspired me to pursue phonetics, the study of speech sounds. In this way, my love of music and language are intertwined as I study the melody of speech.