As a native speaker of one or several languages, you already know a lot about the languages you speak, often without realizing what you know. For example, you know that “Paula is going to the museum” is grammatical, whereas “Museum is Paula going to the” is ungrammatical. You also know that if you invert the subject and verb and if you let your voice go up at the end, you can change the original statement into a yes-no question: “Is Paula going to the museum.” Furthermore, you also know which sounds can be combined in your language: “spet” could be a possible English word, but “tsep” and “ptes” are not. And you know that you shouldn’t use certain words in certain conversational contexts, where you need to speak more formally than usual. And all this varies across all languages: spoken, written, and signed languages.

Linguistics is the scientific study of language. Here we study what we unconsciously know about language, how children come to acquire language, how language is structured, how languages differ from one another, and how language can influence the way that we think about the world and how we interact with one another.

Linguistics is a fun and fascinating study about how we know what we know about language, how language relates to our other thinking processes, and how languages vary between individual speakers and between geographic regions. Linguistics studies speech sounds (phonetics and phonology), word formation (morphology), how we arrange words and phrases to create well-formed sentences (syntax), how we change our language to fit the social context (pragmatics), and how language in turn influences society (sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology), and so much more. Curious? Then dive into the fascinating world of languages and sign up for a Linguistics course today!