Looking at the enormous economic and social changes under way in Russia and eastern Europe in the 1990s, Annelie Chapman, a graduate student in Slavic linguistics, saw a rare opportunity to study the way a language changes in response to this kind of upheaval. "It's not something that happens every day," she says. "I wanted to take advantage of that."

A paper required for a course in gender linguistics provided an interesting direction. Commercial advertising is a new use of language in Poland, and Annelie decided to look at the gendered aspects of Polish ads: how did advertisers use language features such as grammar, syntax, and vocabulary to target male and female consumers. Polish is an interesting language for such a study because verbs and adjectives express gender, controlled by the gender of the subject.

In one series of ads for a consulting firm, Annelie found that the language in an ad that pictured a woman was more gendered than the language in an ad that pictured a man. Also, the Polish ads seemed to be adopting an image of the professional woman from Western ads: the business woman was attractive but older, and the language served to mute her femaleness.

Both Annelie and her professor, Dr. Olga T. Yokoyama, were excited by her findings. The paper "was remarkable in that it combined a theoretical subject of male-female linguistic distinctions with the pragmatic use of these distinctions in commercial advertising," Dr. Yokoyama says. "The idea is not only novel in Slavic linguistics, but it also promises to be a rare instance of the application of linguistics to matters of the 'real world.'"

And so a dissertation project was born. Annelie's course paper was based mostly on ads found in a national daily newspaper, available at the University Research Library on campus. For her dissertation, she plans to do field research in both Poland and Russia and to expand her scope to include broadcast as well as print advertising. The central focus will be how advertisers "manipulate the language to attract a male or female consumer," Annelie says.

Her interest in foreign language began when she was a child, listening to conversations among family and friends on visits to Sweden, her mother's homeland. In high school, Annelie studied French intensively, and she chose Dartmouth for college because of its language program. There, she began to study Russian. "I was interested in that area of the world, the history and the culture," she says. "I liked the language right away. The chemistry was good."

After Dartmouth, Annelie worked as a program officer for the International Research and Exchanges Board, which arranges doctoral exchanges between Russia and the United States. Later, she was among the founders of Portfolio Systems, a developer of business software; she handled its marketing needs for five years.

Looking back at these previous careers, Annelie says, "I enjoyed trying them out and seeing what they were about, but I was always feeling unfulfilled in some way. Something was not quite there for me." And eventually, a turning point came that brought her back to graduate studies-at UCLA-and to a new language, Polish.

She has found that her software experience has academic applications. When Annelie got an assignment as a teaching assistant, she took a class in teaching methods. For her project, she looked into possible uses of the Internet for instructional purposes. After the class was done, she kept up her research "on my own time, because I was interested in it." That interest paid off.

Last fall, she received an Office of Instructional Development grant to create supplementary lessons for beginning Slavic language classes, giving students an opportunity "to practice their language skills in an authentic context" on the Internet.

Her experience as a teaching assistant was also a success. "I thought I would like teaching, and I really did like it," Annelie says. "There were no reservations about it." As a result, she hopes to make a career in academia, "if academia will have me." Although she would like to continue research in Slavic linguistics, she's also willing to work in educational technology or teach language classes to undergraduates. Willing to be flexible, she's not worried about what will happen when she completes her dissertation.

"If you go into something with all of your guns blazing, and say I really want to do this and apply all of your skills and energy," Annelie says. "something will turn up."

Published in Spring 1998, Graduate Quarterly