What the f%@k even is linguistics?
Anna Anossovitch
The Modern & Medieval Languages (MML) faculty at Cambridge recently became the brand spanking new MMLL faculty, officially acknowledging that the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics is not, in fact, a modern nor a medieval language. But the delay in faithful faculty labelling can be forgiven, considering that the current Department of Linguistics was only created in 2011. That’s right, disregarding its upcoming reprisal, the entirety of the Shrek franchise is older than the Cambridge University Department of Linguistics. Regardless of administrative buffoonery, diligent linguistic research at Cambridge has actually been conducted for decades now. What is it about the field which makes it an elusive entity, and consequently begs the question - what the fuck even is linguistics?
To properly dissect the diverse field of linguistics maybe it’s better to first examine what it’s not. Let’s bust a few myths.
“Did you... just say the f-word? This is an educational article; you can’t say that!”
Wrong, you can say whatever you like. What sort of language we find acceptable is a social construct, and a linguist’s job is not to police language. To use an important piece of jargon, linguistics is often incorrectly associated with ‘prescriptivism’. This is a very old and elitist school of thought which believes there is a right or wrong way to speak a language. Modern linguists have largely departed from a prescriptivist perspective in favour of ‘descriptivism’, which acknowledges language as a naturally occurring phenomenon (arguably, a miracle) belonging to its speakers. This means that perhaps the reader will find my use of obscenities rude, or perhaps interesting, attention-grabbing, overdramatic, strange, cheeky, or all of the above. Either way, a linguist will study the language which I use, rather than tell me how to use it.
“Isn’t it ”Sam and I”, not “Me and Sam”? You’re a linguist; you should know.”
Yes, I do know. I know that prescriptivism is for schmucks and ‘speaking correctly’ is a scam perpetrated by the upper class to exert their social power on the dimension of communication. Grammatical rules are completely arbitrary, and are only there so we can communicate efficiently. You can disregard them if you like, even though others might find it harder to understand you. In the words of Kevin from The Office, “Why waste time say lot word, when few word do trick.” But sometimes rules don’t affect comprehensiveness at all (cf. example above), so why follow them? Language is in the eye of the beholder and is also constantly changing. The change has to start somewhere - it could even be with you! To be frank, even most linguists don’t have a pristine understanding of their native grammar, perhaps because they are the first to reject prescriptivism as a biased approach to a human trait as innate as communication. I will personally, however, pick on your misuse of ‘you’re’ and ‘your’, but only because it pisses off my inner boomer.
//content warning: absurdly triggering question for linguists everywhere
“Linguistics? That’s so cool! Which languages do you study?”
Linguistics is the scientific study of language. Not “a” language, but all of human communication in its entirety. Slavic languages? Yes. Extinct dialects? Yes. Sign languages? Yes. Hand gestures? Yes. Emojis? Yes! In fact, some of the most interesting parts of linguistics lie in what is explicitly not said, but rather implied contextually. Using words, along with the absence of words, to convey meaning is something that transcends individual languages. For many aspects of human communication, their specific instantiation in a language system is irrelevant to us. For other aspects, their diversity across the world’s language systems is what provides insight into our underlying communicative strategies. So on one hand, linguists study no languages at all, but on the other hand, study every language to ever exist. However, I should admit that academic linguistic discussion does tend to be overly Eurocentric.
“Woah, linguistics? How many languages do you speak?”
You’re confusing a linguist with a polyglot. Polyglots pride themselves in learning and being able to converse in multiple languages. While linguists do typically have a few languages under their belt (likely due to a fascination with foreign communication systems), this is by no means a prerequisite, and it’s not abnormal to meet a monolingual linguist. What tends to happen as you steadily read more and more linguistic papers, is that you become acquainted with bits and pieces of various languages, never fully acquiring one to a conversational level. I may know a disturbing amount about plural marking in Yucatec Maya, but only because I was using it to show a false dichotomy between inflectional and derivational morphology. I have never memorised a vocab list, nor do I know a single syntactic structure. As any MML-er will tell you, learning a language takes dedication and perseverance, so linguists happily pick and choose bite-sized sections of the world’s languages to prove whichever point they are making at the time.
A post-modernist take on the current state of affairs. Image from https://www.facebook.com/linguisticsmemes/
It’s difficult to succinctly describe linguistics because of its marvellous diversity. I’ll try to outline most of the mainstays but keep in mind that there are countless other crossovers and niche burrows to be explored, which may also come into conflict with each other, as shown in the tasteful meme above.
Phonetics - speech sounds and how we make them. E.g. How come old people sound ‘croakier’ than young people? Is it possible to somehow objectively transcribe speech sounds?
Phonology - patterns of sounds in different languages. E.g. Why does the first ‘l’ in ‘little’ sound different to the second ‘l’? Why do Japanese speakers have trouble differentiating ‘r’ from ‘l’?
Morphology - structure and creation of words. E.g. If a language has lots of grammatical marking, does that allow it more freedom with word order? Is ‘sister-in-law’ one word? What about ‘ain’t’? What about ‘gimme’? What about ‘whomst'd've'ly'yaint'nt'ed'ies's'y'es’?
Syntax - structure and creation of sentences. E.g. How are babies so dumb yet are able to perfectly learn an entire language’s grammar? Why are we willing to say ‘who do you wanna see win?’ and ‘who do you want to win?’, but not ‘who do you wanna win?’
Semantics - lexical and logical meaning. E.g. Does our language system affect our thought system, or does our thought system affect our language system? How do we know that sharpness in ‘sharp knife’ refers to its blade, but sharpness in ‘sharp pain’ refers to its intensity?
Pragmatics - meaning in context. E.g. What stylistic changes do we make when talking to a mate vs. a cool supervisor vs. an uncool supervisor? Why do racists all of a sudden love talking about how all lives matter?
Historical linguistics - how languages change and their histories. E.g. How come Danish is more similar to Swedish than it is to German? How did the English spelling system get so fucked up?
Language acquisition - process of learning a (first or second) language. E.g. Why do adults struggle so much with language learning compared to children? Does being bilingual actually make you smarter?
Sociolinguistics - aspects of society reflected in language. E.g. What is everyone’s beef with the Birmingham accent? Why am I not allowed to say the f-word in an article?
Psycholinguistics - psychological and neurobiological bases of language. E.g. Are there specific areas of the brain dedicated to language? Hwo aer we albe to raed wrdos eevn wenh tehr’ye smacbreld lkie tihs?
Computational linguistics - computational modelling of language. E.g. How on earth do we teach a computer how to speak? Are artificial neural networks so good because they mirror the brain’s architecture?
Hopefully this overview explains why some linguists seem like compscis while others seem like Plato. Language permeates most aspects of life, and life can likewise be reflected in language, hence the uncanny reach of various linguistic branches. Empirical investigation of a central human trait is important, even if it is approached from 20 different directions. So ultimately, linguistics is what you make of it. Therefore I leave the question with you, dear reader - what the fuck even is linguistics?
