Linguistics

What is Linguistics?

Whenever I mention that I studied Linguistics at uni, people ask me how many languages I speak. It so happens that I do speak a couple, so answering the question is not an issue. The thing is though, that when you study linguistics you don’t sit around all day learning foreign languages. Apparently this is not common knowledge. Check out the Facebook group ‘You’re a Linguist? How many languages do you speak?’ – its 1000+ members share my experience!

They explain: “Being a linguist is not about speaking lots of languages!! It’s about coming up with theories based on data that you read about in someone else’s paper and that probably don’t account for any variation or possibly anything at all…or something…”

My guess is that the only part of this explanation that anybody would understand is the “or something” bit, which tells them that this whole Linguistics thing is complicated – too complicated to explain properly (which it is not, by the way).

So what is Linguistics really?

Studying linguistics means learning everything about languages. You can study:

• Language parts and how they are joined together to make words – Morphology
• Sounds and how they are organized in languages – Phonology / Phonetics
• Sentences or phrases and how grammar rules are used to form them – Syntax
• Meaning and how it is conveyed by words or language parts – Semantics
• Meaning and how special words and phrases are used in particular situations – Pragmatics

When you set out to learn what there is to know about languages, there are various approaches you can take.

• You can try to learn how one particular language works (Descriptive Linguistics) or you can try to find out general patterns that apply to all languages (General or Theoretical Linguistics).
• You can study how languages change over time (Historical or Diacronic Linguistics) or you can examine languages as they are irrespective of time (Synchronic Linguistics).
• You can also focus on how languages are similar and how they differ (Comparative Linguistics).

Although you can learn about a language by treating it as a system of rules, in order to really learn everything there is to know about languages, we need to also think about how languages are actually used in everyday life. Languages aren’t just abstract systems that you can analyze and study academically without ever thinking about the context in which they are used! For instance:

• What is the relationship between languages and their cultural environment? – Anthropological Linguistics / Ethnolinguistics
• What is the relationship between languages and their social environment? – Sociolinguistics
• What is the relationship between languages and their geographical environment? Geographical Linguistics

In our everyday use of languages we stumble across some issues. How do you learn languages? What is the best way to teach languages? Why are some people better at learning foreign languages than others? How do you go about translating languages? Do we need laws and regulations to govern language use in society? All of these sorts of issues are addressed in the field of Applied Linguistics. It focuses on the application of linguistic knowledge to all sorts of language problems.

As I’ve just explained, when you learn about languages you can look at the bigger picture, the context, but you can also look at languages from a more individual or even biological perspective. You can study:

• the mental and psychological processes involved in understanding/learning/using languages – Psycholinguistics
• the development of language ability in an individual/child – Developmental Linguistics
• the disorders that lead to language and speech problems – Clinical Linguistics

So, as you can see, Linguistics is a very broad field. It involves learning about languages, rather than studying individual languages. There are many aspects of languages that you can look at: morphology, phonology, phonetics, syntax, semantics and pragmatics. You can take different linguistic approaches: general/descriptive, diacronic/synchronic or comparative. You can also take into consideration the language context, whether it is anthropological, sociological or geographical. You can also look at how human beings use or learn languages from a developmental, clinical or psychological way.

So that’s it. That’s Linguistics for you in basic terms. You may have a lot of questions, which you are welcome to post in the comments. I will be writing more posts on Languages and Linguistics, so check this space out regularly. If you’re learning a foreign language and want some basic insights & suggestions, check out the Introduction to Language Learning post. Hope it helps!