Karly

There’s a strange tension in being a language girl in a lit world.

I didn’t study literature, not formally. Not in that read-a-thousand-novels-then-write-your-dissertation-on-Virginia-Woolf kind of way. I studied language: pragmatics, phonetics, syntax… I diagrammed sentences while other people dissected plot arcs. I read poems for their deixis and syllabic structure before I ever read them for beauty.

And sometimes, especially in spaces like Bookstagram or even literary discussions, I feel like that shows.

Not in a bad way. Just in a “who let the linguist in?” kind of way.

Literature is the House. Language is the Foundation.

I love books, deeply. I love stories and poetry and rhythm. But I don’t always come at them the way others do. I read a sentence and wonder why it works, what it does. Why is it ambiguous? Why does it make me feel weird? Why that line, that choice, that word order is what lingers.

It’s not that I don’t love the literary. I do. Fiercely. But my first instinct isn’t always “what does this mean?” It’s “how did they say it?” And sometimes, that feels like speaking a slightly different dialect than everyone else in the room.

I Read Differently, And That’s the Point

I used to worry I was missing something. That I hadn’t read enough classics, that I wasn’t fluent in literary criticism, that I didn’t know how to talk about books “properly.” That because I could break down the sociolinguistic implications of a character’s idiolect, but not name three Modernists without checking Wikipedia, I didn’t belong in the conversation.

But here’s the thing: language is literature. Or at least, it’s the tool that builds it.

The rhythm of a novel. The repetition in a poem. The gaps in a character’s dialogue. These are all linguistic choices. Studying language gave me a toolkit for reading that’s different, not lesser, not wrong. Just… different.

And honestly? Sometimes that’s exactly what a literary world needs. A reminder that meaning isn’t just something we analyse. It’s something we construct, word by word, clause by clause, speaker by speaker.

If You Read Differently, You’re Still a Reader

So this is for the linguists who annotate their books with notes about deixis and anaphora. For the language students who still feel awkward calling themselves literature people. For the girls who studied verbs instead of verse.

You belong here, too.

You don’t have to have an English Lit degree to talk about books. You don’t need a canon to speak with conviction. You don’t have to quote Derrida to know something is beautifully said. If you love language, its patterns, its weirdness, its rhythm, its power, then you’re already part of this world. Even if you read a little sideways.

So yeah, I’m a language girl in a lit world. I love speech acts and passive constructions and a well-placed comma. I notice when a narrator code-switches or when a character avoids answering a question. I don’t always quote the most famous line. But I’ll always know why the sentence just before it matters, too.

And that’s something worth saying.