Interview with Wolfgang U. Dressler – an Austrian professor of linguistics  

1. When and where did you start to learn your first foreign language? What language was it? 

English with 8 years

2. Why did you start learning the foreign language? Was it compulsory, or did you have any other motivation?

Because of British relatives staying with them

3. What was the most difficult for you to learn? What is the best way according to you to learn a language?

No, because they knew also my native language German

4. Did you like learning a foreign language? Why yes? Why not?

Yes, but most of them I learnt for a reading knowledge

5. What languages can you speak?

(German), English, French, Italian, Spanish; a bit of several others

6. When did you start having a feeling that you are able to speak a foreign language fluently?

No generalisation possible

7. Is there any language you would like to learn? Why?

Too late now (I’m old), but I’d like to recover others which I was able to speak earlier, such as Greek, Russian, Turkish – and Latin

8. Which language is according to you: the easiest, the most difficult and the most beautiful?

Easiest for medium oral competence: Italian

Dreadfully difficult some Amerindian languages, Greenlandic

Beautiful: Ancient Greek 

9. Have you experienced any funny / terrible story thanks to languages?

Yes due to false friends.

About Wolfgang U. Dressler

• He has contributed to various fields of linguistics, especially: – phonology; – morphology; – text linguistics; – clinical linguistics; – and child language development 
• He is one of the most important representatives of the ‘naturalness theory’.
• Due to his science-theoretical interests, Dressler introduced a semiotic model into linguistic theory. He also developed a new model of language development which, in morphology, is called the “model of pre- and proto- morphology”.
• Until now, prof. Dressler has authored more than 400 publications, some of which were groundbreaking for various sub-disciplines of linguistics.
• CV and works of prof. Wolfgang U. Dressler.