Julie Sedivy was teaching an introductory linguistics course at the University of Calgary when she had an interaction that captured her long-observed tension between the scientific and literary approaches to language. 

A student sought her out after the first class to thank her for the lecture – and tell her that she would be dropping the course. The reason? This student was a poet. 

“As if loving language required cultivating a certain degree of ignorance of it,” Sedivy writes in Linguaphile: A Life of Language Love (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, out now). “As if this love would burn up under the cool light of knowing too much. As if to learn about language risked snuffing out its spark of the divine.” 

This tension was a big part of Sedivy’s motivation for writing Linguaphile, a literary memoir that takes readers through Sedivy’s life and her experiences with language as well as through the ways one’s relationship with language changes over the course of a life. The book is suffused with and informed by her deep scientific understanding of the way language works. 

“The literary world and the scientific world, both of these worlds that deal with language, I think they are in a state of mutual distrust,” Sedivy says. “There is some tension between the values and techniques of the two ways of writing … but just as knowing multiple languages is hard but ultimately worth it, I feel exactly the same about these two ways of seeing the world and writing about the world.”

Sedivy has been captivated by language for as long as she can remember, in part because of the circumstances of her life: she was born in the Czech Republic and by the time she was five, she had lived in Austria, Italy, and Montreal – movement that exposed her to Czech, German, Italian, French, and English.

This rapid-fire exposure to five different languages in early childhood was the seed of her lifelong appreciation and love of language. 

From childhood, Sedivy believed she would pursue this interest in the typical way – by becoming a novelist. It wasn’t until she was sitting in an introductory linguistics class in her first year of university that she realized there was another way. 

“I was absolutely seduced by the study of linguistics as a science,” Sedivy says. “Nobody told me as a child, or even as an adolescent, that there was this rich science of language that could be tapped into, so when I came across that in university, it was an absolute revelation to me, and I just could not get enough of it.”

Sedivy pursued the study of linguistics and learned things about the ways that sounds work across languages that she was able to take home and share with her multilingual parents, delighting her mother with observations about the way Czech treats certain consonants at the ends of words. She became a psycholinguist and pursued writing, too, and is the author of several academic titles: Memory Speaks: On Losing and Reclaiming Language and Self (Belknap Press, 2021) and Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics (Oxford University Press, 2020), and the co-author with Greg Carlson of Sold on Language: How Advertisers Talk to You and What This Says About You (Wiley/Blackwell, 2011). 

Writing Linguaphile was a different experience altogether – it gave Sedivy the chance to to reunite the two tracks of her appreciation of language. 

“It was always in my mind that this was a book that I wanted to write, but I didn’t have the skills to do it for quite a while,” she says. “It wasn’t until I left my full-time academic job and then very patiently learned to become a writer who could write in ways that really were not constrained by the scientific aspects.”

Throughout the book, Sedivy captures the wonder and magic of language, as she writes about it from these two approaches that have come to define her life. 

The book is divided into three main sections: childhood, maturity, and loss. In the first, Sedivy explores her own multilingual childhood experiences with language, contrasting the joyful way she was exposed to Italian as a preschooler, where “words were like fish, solid things making sudden, unexpected appearances” with the more staid and conventional way she was exposed to Spanish in high school, the language “doled out to us piecemeal by an aging nun who had spent a year or two at a mission in Guatemala.”

In the second, Sedivy recounts discovering linguistics at university, and the pleasure words and language can offer to those who seek it in them. She explores language’s potential for misinterpretation, and how that misinterpretation can have larger implications on a life. 

But it is in the third section, which deals with loss, that Linguaphile becomes intensely personal: during the writing of the book, Sedivy was also dealing with the illnesses and eventual deaths of her younger brother Vac and her husband, Ian. These significant losses informed how she approached her work. 

“What preoccupied me throughout the writing was just a sense of love and connection,” she says. “The depth of ordinary human love, and how powerful that can be, coloured the way that I looked at language throughout that process – as a vehicle for facilitating these connections, and sometimes for failing to make those connections. The sense that our lives are bookended by silence was something that was very salient to me as I worked on the book.” 

Sedivy hopes that readers come away from Linguaphile with a greater appreciation for language and its intrinsic connection to being human. 

“Language is embedded in the project of being human,” she says. “Language makes us the humans that we are. But also the fact that we are human makes language the way it is…. I wanted to convey something about the integrity of that.”

Photo of Julie Sedivy by Ian Graham.