“This nomination feels like a really special reminder that I’m on the right path and doing something that matters,” says Jekaterina Šukalova, a lecturer in the English Philology programme at the Faculty of Philology. Šukalova was recently elected the Faculty of Philology’s Best Lecturer. In honour of this award, this interview explores her inspirations, teaching experience and main fields of research.

This year the students decided to elect you as the best lecturer in the Faculty of Philology. What does this award mean to you?

Honestly, it means a lot. I think many of us (myself included) tend to underestimate our work and feel like whatever we’re doing is never quite good enough, so this nomination feels like a really special reminder that I’m on the right path and doing something that matters. Nice comments from students always make my day, but this feels like a next-level kind of encouragement and appreciation.

Is there a teaching moment you’re especially proud of?

It’s hard to pick one, because there isn’t a single big moment I’m proud of - it’s more like a collection of small ones. I love to see those ‘ah’ moments, whenever a student suddenly ‘gets’ something they struggled with - it’s just satisfying; or when someone who was terrified to speak finally shares an idea or an observation, or when a student tells me after a seminar that they actually enjoy grammar - those little moments add up. They’re the ones that make me proud.

What area of linguistics do you think deserves more attention from students or researchers? 

Lately I’ve been thinking that language in popular culture deserves way more attention. We spend so much time analyzing ‘traditional’ linguistic data, but we all interact with language in movies, games, social media, and other forms of media every single day. There’s so much happening there - identity, ideology, creativity, humor, power dynamics - and it’s all incredibly rich for linguistic analysis.

What inspired you to become a researcher in linguistics? 

I think linguistics chose me. I kept noticing tiny patterns in how people speak, the accents they have, the unusual words they use, and the grammatical structures that stick out, and I couldn’t stop thinking about them. At some point, it turned into a habit of writing these things down, and before I knew it, that curiosity had become actual research.

You teach a course called “English Language in Popular Culture”. What inspired you to create this course and do you think it resonates with your students? Why? 

I actually got the idea while reading Red Dead’s History by Tore C. Olsson. In the preface, he tells the story of how he started teaching a history class based on the real historical events behind Red Dead Redemption and Red Dead Redemption II. I’d wanted to teach something related to popular culture (especially video games) for the longest time, but I had no idea how to connect it to linguistics in a meaningful way. That book was the push I needed in the right direction.

Does it resonate with students? I think so. We get to talk about movies, TV shows, video games - basically anything from pop culture - and once students realize that all of this can be analyzed linguistically, the discussions become incredibly lively. It feels relevant to their everyday lives, which makes the whole course much more engaging.

Has any piece of popular culture surprised you with how rich it is for linguistic analysis? 

Honestly, a lot of popular culture surprises me. The moment you start looking at it through a linguistic lens, you realize how much is going on beneath the surface, whether it’s the way characters in a game construct identity, the humor in a TV show, or the way dialogue was shaped in movies during the Production Code era. Things that seem simple at first suddenly become incredibly rich once you start analyzing them.

One of the main case studies in your pop culture course is video games. Is there a linguistic feature in video games that you wish more people noticed? Is there a video game you enjoy that highlights this feature? 

I think language in general tends to get overlooked in games - things like accents, slang, naming conventions, or even speech patterns. Players usually focus on what characters say, not how they say it. But the ‘how’ is just as important. Through language, we can see personality, identity, social dynamics, and even the whole atmosphere of the world. This is especially true with NPCs, whose non-cutscene responses are often surprisingly varied and rich. Once you start paying attention to that seemingly boring side of language, games become even more interesting.

If you could invite any video game character as a guest speaker to your “English Language in Popular Culture” lecture, who would it be and why? 

Aside from the most obvious answer, I think it would definitely be Jack Marston from RDR. Having grown up among people from very different social backgrounds and across changing times, his speech is full of sociolinguistic richness, including codeswitching, adapting to different groups, and generational differences, which allows us to see how language shifts across social contexts, generations, and regions. This would make for a really interesting discussion about identity, pragmatics, and social dynamics.