What's Linguistics??

Have you ever wondered why we say "feet" rather than "foots"? Or how a child at the age of 3 has a vocabulary of 14,000 words but can't tie her own shoes? Or what we do with our mouthes to make a b sound different from a p? Or why we rarely say what we actually mean? It's questions like these that intrigue the linguist!

Many people think that a linguist is someone who speaks many languages and works as a language teacher or as an interpreter at the Uni ted Nations. In fact, these people are more accurately called "Polyglots". While many linguists are polyglots, the focus of linguistics is about the structure, use and psychology of language in general.

Linguistics is concerned with the nature of language and communication. It deals both with the study of particular languages, and the search for general properties common to all languages or large groups of languages. It includes the following subareas :

• phonetics (the study of the production, acoustics and hearing of speech sounds)
• phonology (the patterning of sounds)
• morphology (the structure of words)
• syntax (the structure of sentences)
• semantics (meaning)
• pragmatics (language in context)

It also includes explorations into the nature of language variation (i. e., dialects), language change over time, how language is processed and stored in the brain, and how it is acquired by young children. All of these topics are examined in the coursework offered by the University of Arizona's Department of Linguistics.

Although linguistics is still largely unfamiliar to the educated public, it is a growing and exciting field, with an increasingly important impact on other fields as diverse as psychology, philosophy, education, language teaching, sociology, anthropology, computer science, and artificial intelligence.

For a fun sample of what Linguists do, why not try some of the puzzles from the American Linguistic Olympics, held at the University of Oregon.

The Department of Linguistics offers undergraduate major and minor programs of study. In addition, students majoring or minoring in computer science, education, English, foreign languages, pre-law, pre-medicine, psychology, speech and hearing science and many other areas will find linguistics coursework of considerable value. Most linguistics courses are available for Social Science credit and some meet General Education requirements as well (INDV101 -- Language, LING210 and LING211).

Click here for Information on careers in linguistics

Click here to read a Wall Street Journal article on careers for people with degrees in Linguistics

Click here to link to more information on the field of linguistics.