Why Study Linguistics

The first time I taught Linguistics to high school students, I asked students to write about what they ultimately learned by taking the class.  Here are some selected responses:

-''I learned to take time out of every day to see something new about
language.''

-''Because of our exposure to Linguistics, we are able to perform better in
our foreign language and English classes.''

-''I listen to the way language is spoken now, rather than state how it's
supposed to be spoken. My favorite fact learned in Linguistics is that
every single person has an idiolect, their own completely unique way of
speaking.''

-''At first I thought that it seemed such a hopeless thing that languages
that had been spoken in my lifetime could be dead before I graduate
college. But I also thought about how that proves that language is a
living thing, which is something we discussed early in the class. There's
a cycle, and some languages die while others are still developing.''

-''Talking about how people talk to members of the opposite sex, how
mothers and daughters speak to each other, and how the speech of people who
belong to different social classes differs was not only interesting, but
was also something I never expected to do with a class. I'd never been in
a class that would have.''

-''We learned how to read, write, and understand IPA. We learned what a
pidgin is and how it is formed. We learned Greek and Latin root words and
disproved myths about language. We learned about accents and much more
although I don't have nearly enough time to get into everything.''

-''This class opened my ears.''

-''Researching Arabic was one of the most interesting experiences I had in
the class. With the new knowledge I have discovered about Arabic, I am now
interested in learning how to speak it as well.''

-''We learned that infants in a sense are the best linguists, due to the
fact that they can learn any language that is spoken to them.''

-''I originally had no clue how to 'observe language.' When my instructor
initially explained it, I thought, 'Wow, this is the most tedious thing in
the world.' But I was wrong! When I was going home that day, I overheard
this phone conversation. This girl was saying that she was 'on the bus'
and that she had been 'in the car' that morning. I thought to myself, 'Oh
my gosh! Language Observation!' Why ''on''? Why ''in''? With that I
hurried and wrote it down. The next day I explained to the class what I
had observed and the response that I got was 'Wow, that's interesting' and
we talked about why that might be. Since then I've been not only observing
how people talk and what words people use, but I feel like I've been taught
to ask 'Why?' and this alone is probably the most valuable thing that I've
learned in this course.''

-''I loved thinking about the concept of there being languages with out a
base-10 number system. Though it seems so strange to us, it's completely
normal for some cultures. In the case of the Piraha tribe, they didn't
even use numbers, just general estimations of the quantity of something.
It brought about concepts that explored how differently you may perceive
the world if you were native to a different language.''

-''I really appreciate the fact that we were able to take this class
because now I'm considering taking Linguistics in college.''

-''Our class reached out to people to show them what IPA was. When our
school had our annual Festival of Nations, students from our class made
name tags for people in IPA. I thought this was interesting because some
had never heard of this and our class was the first to tell them about it.''

-''Our Linguistics class became somewhat of a city of language, a metaphor
created by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Every student brought their own brick.''