Linguistics: The Science of Human Languages
Timeline ilustrating the English language origins.
By: Tayná Mesquita
When we talk about the professionals called “Linguists” maybe the most common things we think of is that this professional is someone who develops dictionaries and glossaries, or is only someone specialist in grammar. For real, this are things that a linguist can do, but this profession goes further on. Linguistic is a very vast field, and there’s a lot of expertises in it.
According to the Linguistic Society of America (LSA)*, the modern discipline of linguistics has begun with the 19th Century “discovery of the links between seemingly unrelated languages spoken in Europe and on/around the Indian subcontinent. It was determined that these Indo-European languages shared a common ancestor language, Proto-Indo-European (PIE)”. In a few words, linguistics is the scientific study of human language instead of being only the study of a single language. It works with the description, explanation and different languages analyses (including oral and non-verbal languages). It searchs how the humans acquire language since the childhood, the structure of languages and how it varies, and how it influences the way we interact with each other. For example, a linguists can study how the mind produce the elements of language, how the language is used between peoples and cultures, and can collect and catalog the sounds or signs within a language.
What will you study in a linguistic degree at Unicamp?
At Unicamp, the curriculum of this course offers basic education in the different linguistic fields (phonetics, morphology, semantics, pragmatics, conversation and discourse analyses, history of linguistic ideas, sociolinguistics, neurolinguistics, psycholinguistics, indian languages and etc. There is some elective disciplines offered too, that can be choosen either in pure or applied linguistic fields or even in literary theory or any other area (verificar). At the end of the course, the student has to develop a monography under orientation of a department Professor in one of the many areas of linguistic some of witch have been mentionated above. The student also has to take classes in English, German, French, Spanish or Italian and one semester of Latin. A student graduated in Linguistic can supplement his studies subscribing himself to take disciplines from the curriculum offered by the course called at IEL “Letters”. At same time that a student graduated in Arts can ask for supplement in Linguistics.
How can you work as a linguist?
How mentionated above, its a very vast field. Among the different actuations a linguist have, we can mentionate:
Clinical linguist – Is a kind of speech pathologist, working with language usage problems.
Acquisition Specialist– It study issues like language acquisition (learning to use a native or non-native language) in individuals, while evolutionary linguists study how language changes through time and throughout the species.
Neurolinguists and psycholinguists – It studies the brain and cognition in relationship to language use.
Describing and documenting languages (what particularly in Brazil is very necessary, there is estimated 150 different indigenous languages, each only 15 has a satisfactory documentation).
Working in education – Here you can develop educational materials, train teachers, search ways of teaching language- related topics with specific communities, and teach different levels.
Non-natural languages speacialist - It can work with artificial intelligence,natural language processing and computer-mediated language learning, for example.
You can also work with the journalistic/publishing industry, with dictionaries (lexicography), as an translator on interpreter, and others.
In conclusion, there is no doubt that the linguist is very significant for the society. There is no society without language, and with the results of their studies, the linguist can help us to improve our communication, understand better how language works and can be used,how people stablish sense in language interactions, study biases and social constructions that are revealed by the analysis of speeches and expressions commonly disseminated,help us to understand in different ways local and global communication,understand and preserve cultures, interpreter human language interactionsm, understanding the functioning of our brains on language processes, etc.
* https://www.linguisticsociety.org/
The Linguistic Society of America website has a very vast material about Issues in Linguistics, Anual Meetings, Institutes, and other publications related to this field of work.