What is Linguistics?

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is one of the frontier areas of cognitive science, addressing such basic questions as:
•How are human languages structured?
•How does a child learn a human language (or better, the complex systems of grammar that make a human language possible)?
•How does someone learn a second language?
•How does knowing two languages affect the way a person speaks/understands each of them?
•How can a computer be made to process/produce a human language?
•Why and how do languages change over time?
•How do you go about describing the workings of a particular language?
•Do other species have languages comparable to human languages? Could another species learn a human language?
• Why is the same language spoken differently by different groups of people? Why are there different dialects of a language?
•Are human languages arbitrarily different from one another, or do they share some universal characteristics?
If such questions sound interesting, you might be in for a treat studying linguistics. At UTEP, you can do this at the undergraduate or graduate level.