Linguistics!

[AsylumFlower]

I've noticed several people on this forum are linguists/like linguistics and languages, which is one of my passions.

If you study it, what branch do you study? If not, what are you most interested in?

What's your favorite thing about the topic?

[SomethingClever]

I'm a grad student in speech-language pathology (study and treatment of people with all kinds of communication/ language disorders), and I had a linguistics minor in college. As a future SLP I predominantly study sociolinguistics and pragmatics, which were my favorite aspects when I studied linguistics in undergrad, too (but I liked everything... except syntax. Which basically turns language into math ). I really love studying how strongly language and dialect are related to culture, identity, and even how we see the world.

[March Hare]

I liked phonetics and phonology. I just dipped my toes in those waters a couple of years ago, but it helped me understand the concepts of how to learn proper pronunciation like nothing ever did before. I love widely applicable systems.

[Chanel_no5]

I've always been into languages, but I'm not educated, due to more practical reasons. What I love about languages is their power, it's like magic. I think it’s interesting how words can sound very much alike even in different languages - sometimes even in languages that aren't closely related at all. You can do so much with languages; spread information, tell stories, make jokes, describe things so that people can see exactly what you have seen.

Languages are powerful tools. Possibly the most powerful of tools there are. It doesn’t matter how much knowledge you have, if you have no means of passing it on. Communication is the key to everything.

Edited to add how interesting it is that everything I like comes back to that one thing: power. Scary, isn't it?

Edited August 12, 2015 by Chanel_no5

[AsylumFlower]

I love how everyone has such different things to say...

My favorite thing about languages is that we can watch them evolve, and trace their history back thousands, or millions, of years. I love looking at a set of related, but completely unintelligible, languages and finding the connections between them. It makes me feel like we aren't so isolated - everything (or at least, so much) is connected if you go back far enough. I love that we can reconstruct proto-languages of all the language families in the world, just by looking at the various things they've become. We can know about something we have no record of, something that should be completely lost in time... but it's not. And by looking at language and language families geographically, we can follow the path of human migration. We can see what groups went where. Sometimes it's not where we expect. I know it's not completely certain, there are so many variables, but that's another part of why it fascinates me.

I also love the other side of this, looking at very recent language trends (like Internet dialects of English.) and trying to predict where they will go.

It's like time travel.

Edited to add how interesting it is that everything I like comes back to that one thing: power. Scary, isn't it?

Really cool, actually! I love how in human beings too, everything is connected if you go back far enough. (of course, most people won't let you analyze them ) Of my ridiculously nerdy obsessions, another is psychology. (the third is space.)

I really love studying how strongly language and dialect are related to culture, identity, and even how we see the world.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I did a project on that once.

Anything interesting?

Edited August 13, 2015 by AsylumFlower