Linguist or Polyglot?

The mind is a verb, not a noun. -Dan Siegel

When you meet someone who calls himself a linguist, do you ask how many languages he speaks?

Do you ask what language she speaks fluently?

A linguist is NOT somebody who speaks many languages.

A person who speaks many languages is a POLYGLOT.

A linguist studies the SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE.

Linguists study the grammars of languages using the scientific method. Linguists examine data from languages to find patterns or rules within a language and across languages. The grammar of a language includes rules describing (NOT prescribing) the following:

Phonetics: articulatory phonetics (how language sounds are produced with the mouth), acoustic phonetics (the transmission of speech sounds through the air), and auditory phonetics (the reception of speech sounds in the ear and how they are processed)

Phonology: the inventory of sounds in languages, phonotactics (how sounds are combined), and phonological changes (such as voiced stops /b, d, g/ become devoiced [p, t, k] in word final position – like German!)

Morphology: the study of morphemes, which are the smallest unit of language that has meaning. Commonly known as root words, prefixes, and suffixes. Some languages has INFIXES!

Morphophonology: the intersection of phonology and morphology

Morphosyntax: the intersection of morphology and syntax

Syntax: the lexicon (inventory of words in a language), how words are put together to form phrases and sentences, transformational changes in word order; commonly studied are such things as phrase structure trees, X-Bar Theory, Optimality Theory, Government Binding Theory

Semantics: the study of meaning and logic

Pragmatics: the study of language in use

Discourse analysis: the study of discourses, which are anything longer than a sentence, such as a conversation or short story

Linguistics also includes:

Field study of languages, such as to meet with native speakers of undocumented languages or endangered languages to write a grammar and capture it before it disappears when the last native speakers die

Historical linguistics: the study of how languages change over time (diachronic linguistics, as opposed to synchronic linguistics which studies a language at one point in time)

Histories of languages and etymologies of words (NOT entomology)

Language typology: classifies and studies languages in the categories of isolating, agglutinating, synthetic, and polysynthetic

Language universals : describes aspects of grammar that are common to all human languages and tendencies found in human languages

Universal Grammar: the attempt to write an all encompassing grammar that accounts for all known human languages. But what about languages that existed in the past and are no longer spoken? What about languages that may exist in the future?

First language acquisition

Second language acquisition

Computational linguistics

Linguistics intersects with many interdisciplinary studies such as:

Sociolinguistics: the study of social variation or geographical variation

Psycholinguistics: the study of psychology and language

Neurolinguistics: the study of how language is processed in the brain

Specialists in the following fields might study language by scientific means:

Anthropology

Communication and intercultural communication

Philosophy and logic

Semiotics

Speech and hearing sciences

Speech and language pathology / communication disorders

Sign languages like ASL: They have rule-governed grammars just like spoken languages

History

Artificial languages, machine language

Abilities in specific languages like listening, speaking, reading, writing, and orthography

Linguistics is one of the core sciences of COGNITIVE SCIENCE along with philosophy, psychology, computer science, and neuroscience.