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.