Let's see. Hard to say. My grandmother spoke an Italian dialect at home with her sons, but a weird kind of Italian inter-dialectal lingua franca with other Italians in her home town who all came from different dialect areas of Italy. During high school, I spent a lot of time in the library, which had a beautiful old OED bound into volumes from fascicles. Reading the etymologies therein made me wonder about all the other languages that English was related to. The first book I ordered from a publisher was Braune's Gotische Grammatik. They didn't carry it in any local book stores. (Actually at the time there was only one in our town, the owner of which was kind enough to show me Books in Print and how to order books using it.) Before graduation from high school, I also started to use the libraries at some local colleges to read linguistics books. Pei, Whatmough, Bloomfield, Sapir, Jespersen, Brugmann, et al. What started out with words soon morphed into a genuine interest in how languages differed from one another or historically from different versions of themselves. By the time I got to university, I majored in linguistcs.
