User:Svenska84

Basic Info
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.

Where I've lived
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.

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Articles I've written or contributed to:

 * California English
 * Turlock, California
 * Solana Beach, California
 * Smoking ban
 * Line D (Buenos Aires)
 * Belgrano, Buenos Aires
 * Asian Argentine
 * Rioplatense Spanish
 * Buenos Aires Metro
 * Buenos Aires
 * Asian American
 * Obelisk of Buenos Aires
 * Carlos Thays
 * San Francisco, California
 * Chinatown
 * Hong Kong English
 * Shibboleth