Is Stephen King a Linguist?

[Roach.118]

I'm a college student studying Linguistics and also an avid Tower fan. I wrote a research paper about a year ago strictly testing the linguistic features of high speech to see if it could be qualified as a viable language. I also analyzed some trends found in low speech. Additionally, I found this passage in Pet Semetary:

"Small children all sounded like immigrants learning a foreign language in some helter-skelter but fairly amiable way. He knew that babies make all the sounds the human voice box is capable of ... the liquid trill that proves so difficult for first-year French students, the glottal grunts and clicks of the Australian bush people, the thickened, abrupt consonants of German. They lose the capability as they learn English, and Louis wondered now (and not for the first time) if childhood was not more a period of forgetting than of learning." (Pet Semetary, 293)

It's full of linguistic facts that are all very true.
It appears to me that King must have at least some basis of knowledge in the field of Linguistics.
Does anyone know if this is true?

[Ubasti]

Hi and welcome

I don't know the answer to your question, but that's pretty interesting. Thanks for posting it.

[Tery]

Mayhap. But remember that Uncle Stevie has some excellent research assistants

[tillyn]

Well he use to teach English did he not?

[asoul]

Hmmm, much very mighty people are linguists (e.g., the former Black Pope)... Is Stephen King one of them?

[tak113454]

Hey. I have no answer to your question, but you might want to check out an article called:

"The Power of the Spoken Word in the Works of Stephen King." It is by Karen A. Hohne in the Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 28, issue 2 (Fall 1994).

It analyzes the orality used in King's texts, especially the use of both high/low speech.