Does perl & PM attract people with an interest in linguistics?

While programming languages are bona fide written languages, the perception of languages strongly influences ones desire to learn a language, programming or otherwise. I would speculate that of the subset of linguists who are competent programmers, few know perl. Programmers and linguists have completely different criteria (and perspectives) for evaluating a programming language. While programmers can speculate as to the requirements and preferences of linguists, such speculation would amount to mere speculation. You'd have to poll linguists.

Does perl & PM foster an interest in language?

While perl is a valid written language, coding perl programs does not supplant the need to cultivate non-programming linguistic skills. The existance of such nodes as "Cool Uses for Perl", "Perl Poetry", and "Obsfucated Code" indicates an interest in linguistics as it pertains to programming; however this does not necessitate interest in linguistics in general. Moreover, there is a difference between programming, communication, and linguistics. Poor documentation may be written by an adept programmer, unable to communicate the language necessary for clarity. Furthermore, the quality of the writing is not indicative of ones interest in linguistics.

With regard to perl specifically, while there are a variety of Lingua modules on CPAN, the nature of the modules does not seem to promote linguistics with the possible exceptions of Latin (Lingua::Romana::Perligata) and Chinese (Lingua::Sinica::PerlYuYan).

Frankly, it would be difficult to isolate perl's contribution to an individuals linguistical inclinations.